Help with MySQL character sets and collations

[eluser]Daniel Peraza[/eluser]
Hi!, I'm using the Active Record Class to store user-edited data into a MySQL 5 DB, which uses utf8_general_ci as collation. The problem is that A.R.C. is not sanitizing the data properly and when I try to use spanish characters such as áéíóúñ, the data is stored in the DB as áéí&At;.

My database.php config file has these settings:

Code:

$db['default']['char_set'] = "utf8";
$db['default']['dbcollat'] = "utf8_general_ci";