Should we HTML-encode special characters before storing them in the database?

Question

I use MySQL to store data and my web pages are all encoded as UTF-8. I have a lot of Portuguese characters such as ç and õ and I\'m wondering if I

Answer 1

I wouldn't encode it in the database unless there's a clear and definite value to doing that. You (and anyone else who will ever work with the data) will have to remember to un-escape when using that data or escape whatever data you insert, update, or compare to that field. I'm not sure what the benefit is to escaping it, but it's probably not worth it.