Accent marks/symbols not displaying correctly in MySQL database Anytime there's an accent mark (é or ') or symbol (&amp;) in my database it displays as HTML code. The table CHARACTER SET is UTF-8 Unicode and the COLLATION is utf8mb4_general_ci, which should display those characters correctly. Any ideas why this is happening?

(MySQL version 5.7)

Current data

`company`| `firstname`| `lastname`
----------------------------------
A&amp;amp;T  | Patrick    | O&amp;#039;Brien


Expected

`company`| `firstname`| `lastname`
----------------------------------
A&amp;T      | Patrick    | O'Brien


Thank you in advance!
Fix the data source to store actual characters into MySQL, not "HTML entities".

Where necessary, use output routines such as PHP's html_entities() and/or urlencode()