convert special characters.

Help! How do I get special characters to convert correctly when inserting and reading from my database. For example. é => é ë => ë I keep getting ë and é using htmlentities, htmlspecialchars, etc... Any pointers? Please! Going bald over here. here is my funcitons function stringToMysqlFormat($original_input) {

               //for inserting the data with special characters INTO mysql
               $html_encoded = htmlentities(mysql_real_escape_string($original_input));
               return $html_encoded;

} function mysqlToHTMLFormat($encoded) {

               //for displaying the data FROM mysql
               $html_decoded = html_entity_decode(stripslashes($encoded));
               return $html_decoded;

} TIA, Karl DeSaulniers Design Drumm http://designdrumm.com