title: Storing apostrophes, exclamation marks, etc. in mysql database
body: <p>I changed from latin1 to utf8. Although all sorts of text was displaying fine I noticed non-english characters were stored in the database as weird symbols. I spent a day trying to fix that and finally now non-english characters display as non-english characters in the database and display the same on the browser. However I noticed that I see apostrophes stored as <code>&amp;#39;</code> and exclamation marks stored as <code>&amp;#33;</code>. Is this normal, or should they be appearing as ' and ! in the database instead? If so, what would I need to do in order to fix that?</p>