charset / database collation / invalid character

I created a website years ago that's been fine and all of a sudden in the past few days the '£' symbol is now displaying as an invalid character.


The problem seems to be with storing it in a database. All the previous invoices are showing the invalid character but the latest invoice seems to be working correctly.


After checking the database the latest invoice contains some sort of escape character before it '£' instead of '£'.


It's not hosted locally so maybe there has been an update to mariadb or apache which could have caused this?


What would be the best way forward? doing a find and replace on the database to add the escape character? the collation is 'latin1\_swedish\_ci' which was the default collation when i created the site many years ago. Would changing the collation fix this?

[https://imgur.com/a/vESDMqV](https://imgur.com/a/vESDMqV)