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