PHP: Converting utf8 chars from mysql db

I have a longtext in my db where i have some special chars like Ã

How i can convert it to "à"? I've tried using utf8_encode and _decode but it seems 开发者_JS百科not work. Document charset is utf8, and longtext field too.

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It's not about encoding but html entities : http://php.net/manual/fr/function.html-entity-decode.php