Flashdata disappears when certain ASCII codes appear in message

[eluser]Simple Gifts[/eluser]
Hi, folks. I've been chasing a flashdata problem for a few hours, and finally found a simple test to illustrate the problem (CI 2.1). I'm running Apache 2.2.21 on XP.

This works just fine:

Code:

$strTest =' "Hello World" ';
$this->session->set_flashdata('error', $strTest);

However, this fails, showing no flashdata:

Code:

$strTest =' “Hello World” ';
$this->session->set_flashdata('error', $strTest);

Note that in the second example, the only difference is the use of the left and right double quotes (ASCII “ and &#148, instead of the more common double quote (ASCII &#34.

Unfortunately, htmlspecialchars() doesn't escape these double quote characters.

Am I missing something? Is there a character set restriction that I'm not aware of?

Thanks for any help.