I have a form that, among other things, accepts an image for upload and sticks it in the database. Previously I had a function filtering the POSTed data that was basically:

function processInput($stuff) {
    $formdata = $stuff;
    $formdata = htmlentities($formdata, ENT_QUOTES);
    return "'" . mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($formdata)) . "'";
}

When, in an effort to fix some weird entities that weren't getting converted properly I changed the function to (all that has changed is I added that 'UTF-8' bit in htmlentities):

function processInput($stuff) {
        $formdata = $stuff;
        $formdata = htmlentities($formdata, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); //added UTF-8
        return "'" . mysql_real_escape_string(stripslashes($formdata)) . "'";
    }

And now images will not upload.

What would be causing this? Simply removing the 'UTF-8' bit allows images to upload properly but then some of the MS Word entities that users put into the system show up as gibberish. What is going on?