ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 Problem

[alfreema]

So I have posted a thread with extensive details on vBulletin.com, but I am not getting much activity there. Though there have been a couple hints posted for me to try, nothing is working.

I don't know if it's bad form to cross post problems both here and on vbulletin.com?

The symptom is that users are copy/pasting from other websites and their posts are being truncated at special characters. I believe this is because the page is being sent as ISO-8859-1, instead of UTF-8. Anything I do to try and get the Content-type's header to show charset=UTF-8 has failed. I ran lots of independent tests to see where it's breaking and posted those on that link above on vbulletin.com.

I am trying to post lots and lots of details so that someone else with similar problems (there seem to have been many over the years) have a really thorough thread they can use to help troubleshoot their issue.

Should I post all the details in this thread or keep posting on vbulletin.com? I am really at a loss at this point. I have done everything I know how to do, and have isolated the issue to vbulletin. When I hit the database using mysqli with my own PHP, the charset is UTF-8. But any call I make using the vBulletin code base comes back as ISO-8859-1. Changing the charset in the English settings in AdminCP didn't affect it one bit.