Euro sign shows as € when form is submitted

[eluser]cheungj[/eluser]
Hi all!
I've been using CodeIgniter for the past month but this is my first post.
I'm having an issue with the encoding of the € sign.
The form is pre-populated with values from the database. In one of the textareas, there are € signs. They show on the form as normal, but after the form is submitted, I retrieve the value, and it appears as either € or it is omitted.

I noticed that it shows as € when set like so:

Code:

<form action="[removed]" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8">

So I changed the accept-charset to ISO-8859-1. With this setting, the € sign was omitted. I have also tried using ISO-8859-15, to no avail.

I have tried changing the meta tag's charset, which didn't work either.

Does anybody have any ideas?

Additional Info
To display the form in the view, I am actually using:

Code:

echo form_open('[removed]', array('accept-charset' => 'ISO-8859-1'));