Hidden characters

[eluser]Alleknalle[/eluser]
Hi all,

I'm having hidden characters in my database and I don't know how I can make my checks safe enough to delete them.

The problem is the following:

Code:

Studio 79

When you paste it in Notepad++ a ? appears at the beginning of the line. In Netbeans a kind of dash appears.
When I convert the encoding, with mb_convert_encoding, to UTF-8  appears.
And when I use htmlentities or htmlspecialchars

Code:



appears.

It's not a big problem for my database and also not for the output, but when I put it into my CI session, my session is destroyed.

Now I would like to delete this kind of characters, they aren't usefull, but I don't know how.
I think I can't always delete all htmlspecialchars because I'm using WYSIWYG editors too.

Can anyone help me?

To clean the input I'm using trim and xss_clean now. For this input field I'm also using strip_tags.

EDIT:
db collation is utf8_unicode_ci
CI config charset is UTF-8

When I echo my post in CI I see nothing, not even in my source.
When I echo my post in simple, not CI, script I see nothing, but in my source I can see

Code:



[eluser]solid9[/eluser]
Well I copied it and pasted in notepad++.
But the extra character did not appear.
Isn't it your PC is infected with virus?

not sure tho. ^__^

[eluser]Alleknalle[/eluser]
Not infected by a virus. My colleagues are having the same output and when I echo the line on a website using mb_convert_encoding I can see the output

[eluser]Alleknalle[/eluser]
Nobody who can help me?