locate those different charset characters that mes

Question

good day all. I have a site made with a CMS (Joomla), with a module which create some new fields for the users. everything is working fine, but I have some problems regarding "non visible characters" probably.

I will try to summarize the problem:

there is a multiselect field where the user can select some values, those values are taken from the database and inserted in another table, as a list of values separated by "#!#". the issue come from when a user select some of those values, on the second table the value is truncated at a certain charcter and all the selection after that value is truncated. Let me try to make an example:

in the multiselect we have soething like this:

please select some values:
1 lorem ipsum dolor sit
2 consectetuer adipiscing elit
3 Aenean commodo ligula
4 sociis natoque penatibus

if the user select all the lines, in the second field there should be a value like this:

lorem ipsum dolor sit#!#consectetuer adipiscing elit#!#Aenean commodo ligula#!#sociis natoque penatibus

but instead i found this:

lorem ipsum dolor sit#!#consectetuer adipiscing elit#!#Aen

this happens only if the user select certain values, not all (mean there isn't a number of char issue), it sounds like there are some characters that the insert query doesn't handle good. Another thing to know is that those values come from a Microsoft Word file, they should be "cleaned" by pasting them on notepad and then in the field.

what I would like to achieve (in my head, but if there is some other ideas they are welcome) is to "SELECT * FROM tablename" and to write them to screen, or to a file, with some sort of "default" charset which should list every character... possibily with the ? or a square, when it founds a character not in utf8... is that possible, or maybe a UPDATE all the values changing and imposing a give charset... or any other idea...