ElementCriteriaModel UTF-8 Encoding I have been working with data received from Guzzle and it is producing a Unicode String that looks similar to this Bachelor\u2019s Degree (after some parsing). When I save other content within craft through craft()-&gt;entries-&gt;saveEntry( $entry ) The unicode items are converted to their appropriate characters. However, when I use this in the ElementCriteriaModel searches, it does not work because it is using the literal Bachelor\u2019s Degree. It does work when I hard code Bachelor's Degree so the lookup code is functional. Also, I tried all of the StringHelper static functions and have done tons of iterations of mb_convert_encoding( 'Bachelor\u2019s Degree', 'HTML-ENTITIES', 'utf-8' ), htmlspecialchars, and htmlentities, but it has not produced a good result. Here is the code I am using for the query just in case:

$criteria = craft()-&gt;elements-&gt;getCriteria( ElementType::Category );
$criteria-&gt;title = $job[ 'eduReq' ];
$eduReq = $criteria-&gt;first();


Do you all know how to convert this string correctly so that the ElementCriteriaModel uses Bachelor's Degree?
Could this maybe be a unicode issue? Maybe the api plugin is producing \u2019 instead of the unicode to produce a normal '