Storing apostrophes, exclamation marks, etc. in mysql database?

It really depends on what you intend to do with the contents of the database. If your invariant is that "contents of the database are sanitized and may be placed directly in a web page without further validation/sanitization", then having & and other html entities in your database makes perfect sense. If, on the other hand, your database is to store only the raw original data, and you intend to process it/sanitize it, before displaying it in HTML code, then you should probably replace these entities with the original characters, encoded using UTF-8.

So, it really depends on how you interpret your database content.

The &#XX; forms are HTML character entities, implying you passed the values stored in the database through a function such as PHP's htmlspecialchars or htmlentities. If the values are processed within an HTML document (or perhaps by any HTML processor, regardless of what they're a part of), they should display fine. Outside of that, they won't.

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