[eluser]chillbill7[/eluser]
Ok, I figured out what was causing the problem, but I have no idea why... In my HTML file I have "% caracteristicas%" (without the quotes and without the space), which is a custom tag I use to later substitute a list of characteristics. For some reason, that exact combination makes CodeIgniter or PHP or MySQL freak out. If I change it to $caracteristicas$ it won't be a problem... very weird. Anyway, I just used the $ version and it works so, I don't mind. Just in case anybody is interested.
p.s. I just saw in the preview that the combination "% ca" (without the space) doesn't work here either (spits out an undefined character: �), wonder what it means...