removing strange characters from php string

Question

this is what i have right now

Drawing an RSS feed into the php, the raw xml from the rss feed reads:

Paul’s Confidence

The ph

Answer 1

Is the character encoding setting for your PHP server something other than UTF-8? If so, is there a reason or could it be changed to UTF-8? Though we don't store data in UTF-8 in our database, I've found that setting the webserver's character set to UTF-8 seems to help resolve character set issues.

I'd be interested in hearing others' opinions about this... whether I'm setting myself up for problems by setting webserver to UTF-8 while storing submitted data in Latin1 in our mysql database. I know there was a reason I chose Latin1 for the database but can't recall what it was. Interestingly, our current setup seems to allow for non-UTF-8 character entry and subsequent rendering... it seems that storing in Latin1 doesn't prevent subsequent decoding and display of all UTF-8 characters?