I\'m using Codeigniter not for so long but I\'ve some charset problems.. I\'m asking around at the CI Forum, but I want to go further, still no global solution: http://codei
UTF-8 (without BOM) should give you the best results based on your configuration and there's no need to send separate headers since the encoding is already selected in the head part. Utf8_general_ci should do fine for the MySQL database.
Perhaps the entries in the database are not valid?