Someone submits a text field on my website and their submission is stored in my mysql database. Their comment contains an emoji character. If I store the comment as is, it will be stored as an html entity, such as 😀.
I read in another post that you should not convert special characters to html entities when storing them in your mysql database. But how about the opposite: are special characters so preferable to html entities that I should take the extra step and convert the visitor’s comment from an html entity to a special character before storing it in the database?
EDIT: In case anyone is interested, the reason the emoji characters were being submitted as html entities is that my html page lacked the correct charset setting. Once I set its charset to utf-8, emojis started to get stored as is, rendering my entire question moot.