title: â€¢ Suddenly Appearing instead of Bullets
body: <p>I have a really simple form that takes a textarea and places the contents inside a MySQL database and then a website displays that information. Up until now everything has worked fine including special characters like apostrophes and bullets, however, all of a sudden now apostrophes cause the form to error out and bullets show up as this: â€¢</p>
  
  <p>All the pages are meta encoded as UTF-8, the database collation is UTF-8 and the text area string is being processed by the utf8_encode command.</p>
  
  <p>What could cause this to suddenly happen? </p>
  
  <p>I've been searching around on here for an answer and I can only find situations where people are missing UTF-8 on the database or on the web pages/forms. My only assumption is a PHP version update by the host, however, I cannot confirm that as they use a proprietary system that doesn't let me see the current running version number and I don't know if it would be affected in this way.</p>
  
  <p>If it matters, the textareas are always wrapped in HTML pre tags for formatting.</p>