title: special characters appended to dropdown value before inserting into db
body: <p>i have a dropdown list of countries.. the html code is as below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;select&gt;
  &lt;option value=”Singapore“&gt;Singapore&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;/select&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This html code resides in a php page, which then sends the form and stores the value from the dropdown into mysql db.</p>
  
  <p>Before I send it to db, within php I do a small data sanitization as below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$post_tag2 = mysqli_real_escape_string($db_conn, $post_tag2);
  $post_tag2 = preg_replace('/\s+/', '', $post_tag2);
  $post_tag2 = strtolower($post_tag2);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>where post_tag2 has the value from the dropdown list. i basically convert it into lowercase and remove all the spaces and then store it into my db.</p>
  
  <p>But the result of all this, when the data gets saved into db is like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>â€singaporeâ€œ
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And if the dropdown value is burkina faso, then in db it is: <code>â€burkina</code>
  (basically the word after the space is gone, and then there is that extra symbol before Burkina)</p>
  
  <p>how do i make sure that these extra symbols <code>â€</code> do not come? Also, why is it cutting off the word after the space?</p>
  
  <p>thanks!</p>