If your database settings are set to UTF-8 (and by the sound of your comments they are), you may be seeing these strange characters because your page is not rendering as UTF-8.
UTF-8 documents are supposed to come with a Content-Type header to say what encoding they should be parsed as. To add this header you can add the following code either before or after your view/s get loaded:
$this->output->set_content_type('text/html; charset=utf-8');
In your document's you should add the following line:
<meta charset="utf-8">
If you are rendering text only then you will want to change the part of the header where it says text/html
to something more appropriate such as text/plain
.