You may find that you have a problem with special characters not displaying or showing up as a small black diamond with a ? in the center. Here’s a quick fix seems to work well.
These would be characters like: <, > and &. It also includes characters like: é,?, ø and the curly quotation marks.
At the point you are printing these characters into a page you’ll want to run them through the php htmlentities function. Here’s an example:
htmlentities( $str, ENT_COMPAT, 'Windows-1252' );
Where $str would be any string you wanted to convert to compatible characters.
For more info: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php