I see, well, encoding is a difficult problem. One way I can think of is to make sure all encoding are the same, from the html, php, apache and mysql.
So, check your html file vs the website html file for encoding meta tag. See if there is any different.
Then, if you are on different server, development vs production, check for the locale encoding environment.
Of course, since you say they are from the same database, checking mysql encoding is not necessary.
If, all the above fails, you have a tricky problem.
Google is not much help. But I found a link related to MySQL that maybe of interest:
https://www.bluebox.net/insight/blog-article/getting-out-of-mysql-character-set-hell
Good luck!