Characters being rendered strangely in HTML/PHP

Question

I'm presenting an RSS feed with this part of a PHP function:

echo "<li><a target='_blank' href='$item_link'>$item_title</a></li>";

Using an example, this output the following in HTML:

<li>
    <a target='_blank' href='http://www.internationalaccountingbulletin.com/news/ey-shinnihon-will-audit-toshibas-corrected-accounts-while-under-investigation-4639900'>
        EY ShinNihon will audit Toshibaa€?s corrected accountsa€| while under investigation
    </a>
</li>

The titles have a large amount of discrepancy when it comes to the symbols used.

It outputs this

EY ShinNihon will audit Toshiba’s corrected accounts… while under investigation

as

EY ShinNihon will audit Toshibaa€?s corrected accountsa€| while under investigation

with apostrophes and ellipses (among others) being various symbols prefixed by a€.

How can I convert these symbols back to the originals in PHP?

Answer 1

Choose you character encoding to match your what you are editing check this site to learn more. http://htmlpurifier.org/docs/enduser-utf8.html