Inserting special characters in database

[eluser]Scal[/eluser]
Did you check the database encoding?
If you set you DB to use a specific encoding that doesn't recognize the "special" character you want to save, no CI/PHP code will help.
This of course unless you encode all special characters to their corresponding HTML entity which to me is not a good solution (db could be used for not only web then the HTML entities stored in your texts of your DB are useless for other purposes than web)