title: How to store characters like ♥☆ to DB?
body: <p>Previous issue - was not able to store non-english characters:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3008918/how-to-store-non-english-characters">How to store non-english characters?</a></p>
  
  <p>That was fixed by using UTF8. But realized today that symbols like <code>♥☆</code> are not stored correctly. They get converted to characters like <code>â™¥â˜†</code>.</p>
  
  <p>How can this be fixed?</p>