Text input not being processed properly!

[eluser]TheFuteballer[/eluser]
I'm having an issue deploying basic functionalities on text areas. I have a textarea within my application where users can paste content into and submit to a database. When I spit out whatever is in the database, I'm continually getting wierd characters showing up as it seems CI isn't processing these characters properly.

The characters in question are 'smart' quotes, whose html entity is ’ or “ . When these characters are inserted, I have not found a single PHP function I can run the posted input through that will properly convert these into the correct html entity (above) so it can be displayed back properly on a browser.

Just as a note I have XSS filtering on as a default but I doubt that would be causing any issues.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!