If I knew how to reproduce the problem

You didn't say anything about the problem being intermittent. You made it sound like it was the opposite, that you always got the junk characters with previously-inserted data. Is this not the case? That would make the problem reproducible.

And since it is reproducible, the request is very straight forward. Simply remove everything that's not relevant. You can cut down on huge swaths of code by determining if it's a problem with the data coming from the DB, or if it's a problem with the output.

If it truly isn't reproducible, then please re-explain the problem more clearly.