I see extra characters like â showing because of encoding issues as I found out here - HTML encoding issues - "Â" character showing up instead of " "

I understand that if I set the browser meta encoding to UTF-8, these will not affect anything but I need to strip these extra characters from the database for other purposes.

For eg. :

Text: ↑ should be become Text: ?

But if I run it through utf8_decode it gives me Text: ???

For every other occurrence of the â character, it converts properly to a blank space. Any help will be appreciated.