How does tinymce store Greek text in MySQL?

Question

i have an html page. In the page i have textarea with tinymce. So when the user writes text it is stored formatted in mysql ( with php ). When someone writes greek text everything is working properly,
but,
when i check the text inside the database, i notice that every greek character is saved like this: &alpha, &tau, &mu.... Why is this happening? Doesn' t it take up a lot of space in mysql to save big text in that way? ( when i use textarea without tinymce it saves greek characters normally )

Thank you.

Answer 1

If you only want the necessary XML entities to be encoded, and not all possible named entities as specified in the entities setting, you should probably set the entity_encoding setting to "raw":

tinyMCE.init({
    ...
    entity_encoding : "raw"
});