Submitting textbox results in latin conversion not UTF8?

[eluser]Zero-10[/eluser]
I figured it out last night and as it turns out I was using htmlspecialchars during validation. The sad part is that I had skipped this because the two validations that I was comparing were exactly the same length but didn't have all of the same values. So I glanced at it and dismissed that it could be the problem.

Now I'm off to a new journey, converting bbcode into html syntaxes. off I go, and thanks everyone!