ESS converting MySQL apostrophes to ’

[Wickcheed]

Have a web solution, PHP to MySQL. Just upgraded PHP from 5.x to 7.x. Forcing encoding on PHP solution to UTF-8 via mysqli_set_charset('utf8') (having been doing this all along). And now all double quotes and apostrophes, when they are imported into FM solution, are showing as â€™. The value including those characters are written into MySQL using mysqli_real_escape_string($VAR). Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!