To add to the Flash conversion comment below, here's how I convert back from what I've stored in a database after converting from Flash HTML text field output, in order to load it back into a Flash HTML text field:
function htmltoflash($htmlstr)
{
return str_replace("<br />","\n",
str_replace("<","<",
str_replace(">",">",
mb_convert_encoding(html_entity_decode($htmlstr),
"UTF-8","ISO-8859-1"))));
}