Long before I knew anything - not that I know much even now - I desgined a web app in php which inserted data in my mysql database after running the values through htmlentities(). I eventually came to my senses and removed this step and stuck it in the output rather than input and went on my merry way.

However I've since had to revisit some of this old data and unfortunately I have an issue, when it's displayed on the screen I'm getting values displayed which are effectively htmlentitied twice.

So, is there a mysql or phpmyadmin way of changing all the older, affected rows back into their relevant characters or will I have to write a script to read each row, decode and update all 17 million rows in 12 tables?