Pulling post data from wordpress db results in mis-encoded data

I have integrated wordpress 2.3.1 into a site. On the homepage of the site, I pull post data from the wordpress db to shown the 3 most recent posts. Note that the home page is not a part of wordpress, rather, it is an already existing page before wordpress was integrated.

I’m having issues with encoding when pulling this data from the homepage only. Special characters, such as the — is being encoded incorrectly (“?” with diamond around it). Data is displayed correctly on wordpress portion of site. Note that I am not using wordpress methods to connect to the database and pull data from the homepage.

I am using UTF-8 encoding on my homepage (same for wordress). If I switch the encoding in my browser settings to ISO 8859-1, the characters display correctly on the homepage.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Thank You.