My html editor is displaying hypens incorrectly with MySQLi

MySQL page
He’s been used around cattle and is very broke !

MySQLi page
He’s been used around cattle and is very broke !

Page that is not displaying correctly

<?php
if ("".$WADAhorses->getColumnVal('horse_comments') ."" != "") { ?>
<div class="blogbox">
<span class="small-light">Comments</span><br>
<?php echo $WADAhorses->getColumnVal('horse_comments',false); ?>
<br>
<div class="clearfix">
</div>
</div>
<?php
}
?>

This is usually just an issue with the charset in the mysqli connection not matching the charset on the page or in the database.

Thank you.

I believe you are referring the the actual file that connects to the database so I am pasting that in the private message along with the character set from the page.

FTP info and page details below.
Thank you,

Your database horse table has a default charset of DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1. Your connection defines the charset as UTF-8. That conflict is causing the odd characters.

I updated your connection charset to latin1 and the page displays properly now.

Thank You!

Since I have many pages using the same horse table, would it be better to change the database column horses to UTF-8?

Also some pages are still using the MySQI connection verses mySQL, so adjusting the connection needs to be done in numerous files verses just the database.

Also I noticed the same trouble with hyphens displaying incorrectly on some of my MySQL pages and when I look at that connection I do not see a reference to the charset therefore I am wondering what the resolution is for MySQL.

I usually set all of my fields to utf-8 to make sure they can handle any characters.