Assuming compat is required, the following 2 results were found.
Source: PHP Manual My fix (in some cases): $my_description = html_entity_decode(htmlentities($my_description, ENT_COMPAT, 'ISO-8859-1', true), ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8'); A more updated version: $my_description =...
as entered into the Joomla administrators console with accents and all: html_entity_decode(htmlentities($ftext, ENT_COMPAT,'UTF-8', true), ENT_COMPAT, 'UTF-8');