Problems with title encoding.

[Essencee]

Hello guys.

I have written a small modification to my vBulletin system, which allows to bold threads titles. In the newthread templete, I added a radio / input type which allows the user to choose if he wants to bold the thread title or not.

The problem is as such: I added this code to the newthread.php file:

PHP Code:

...

    $newpost['title'] =& $vbulletin->GPC['subject'];
    $newpost['iconid'] =& $vbulletin->GPC['iconid'];
    
    if ($_POST["boldtitle"])
    {
        if ($_POST["boldtitle"] == "yes")
        {
            $boldtitle = "<b>{$newpost['title']}</b>";
            $newpost['title'] = $boldtitle;
        }
    }
            
    require_once(DIR . '/includes/functions_prefix.php');

... 


The problem is that the title is inserting to the database like this:

<b>test</b>

Actually, it needs to be like this:

<b>test</b>

The encoding of the title field in the database is latin1_swedish_ci.
The encoding of the database connection is utf8_unicode_ci.

Please, help me.
Thanks