Speech-mark turns to " in result of a query

[sparklywater]

I have this function which trims the thread-title of the latest posts after a query fetches the latest posts. Everything works well except I've noticed that if this query trims the thread-title at a speech-mark ( " ) , instead of displaying the speech-mark in the result it shows &quo... instead. But if I increase the cut-off by a few more characters then the speech mark is displayed correctly. How can I make the query display the speech-mark without it displaying '&quot...' at certain lengths of cutoff?

Here is the query to trim the thread-title:

PHP Code:

if (strlen($row['thread_title']) > $vbulletin->options['latest_trimplusthree'])
       {
        // adds the cutoff ... with substr
        $row['thread_title'] = substr($row['thread_title'], 0, $vbulletin->options['latest_trim']) . '...';
       } 


--------------- Added [DATE]1220329262[/DATE] at [TIME]1220329262[/TIME] ---------------

someone help please...