How do I make quotes look like quotes in a string

Question

As a user I input this into the string $description: “This is one of those books that you don’t want to put down …” Romantic Times

This is what appears in the description field of my record: “This is one of those books that you don’t want to put down …†Romantic Times

This is what the mysql record looks like: Field=description, Type= TEXT, Length/Values= "empty", Collation= utf8_general_ci

Why does it display those weird characters? Is it the utf8_general_ci setting?

Answer 1

They are smart quotes. Use normal quotes like this "