Euro sign not showing on site
Try using htmlentities() instead of htmlspecialchars().
Special chars does not convert everything, just a few select characters. The Euro symbol €, needs to be encoded really, €.
If you are serving the page as UTF-8, you will need to ensure you grab the string out of the database in the UTF-8 encoding before putting it on the page. You can do that using:
mysql_set_charset('utf8');(If you're doing that it would also make sense to store your actual table data in UTF-8 too, eg utf8_general_ci, rather than latin1_swedish_ci, so you can deal properly with characters outside of the basic Latin-1 set.)