title: Scrambled text in MySQL database
body: <p>I have a database table called "tweets". I have downloaded tweets using the Twitter Search API. The database table collation is set to latin1_swedish_ci, as advised by MySQL, since it holds up for at least the Enlish language (I read this on the MySQL support pages somewhere).</p>
  
  <p>Anyway, I now see a lot of tweets looking like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$S&amp;amp;P news: Bank of AmericaÃ¢Â€Â™s Mortgage-Bond Accord http://bit.ly/oTXC5a
  @LucciAlerts &amp;gt;&amp;gt; $BAC from a pincher play setup
  ë¯¸êµ­ì‹ ìš©ë“±ê¸‰ì´ë–¨ì–´ì¡Œë„¤ RT @CNBC  RT @alexcrippen: S&amp;amp;P affirms AA+
  </code></pre>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I believe &amp; and the likes can be fixed by using (PHP) htmlspecialchars_decode() to translate them to original characters;</li>
  <li>But I don't know how to fix "AmericaÃ¢Â€Â™s", for instance. Obviously, Ã¢Â€Â™ should be an apostophe ('), but how do I get it back?</li>
  <li>Finally, there are some people who like to put all sorts of ASCII characters in their tweets (stars, "real" smileys instead of emoticons). Those have been stored as "ë¯¸êµ­ì‹ ìš©ë“±ê¸‰ì´ë–¨ì–´ì¡Œë„¤", like above. Is there a way to fix this and if so, how?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Any help is greatly appreciated!</p>