As Zaxo points out, it looks like your data isn't stored as plain text, but as text with HTML-style entities embedded in it. A browser makes the conversion automatically but you'll need to do it yourself.

It's also worth pointing out that you need to know which character set you are dealing with as they can all have differing definitions for characters outside of the ASCII set (ASCII only defines characters up to 127 - 174 is not an ASCII character). The ® sign is number 174 in the ISO-8859-1 character set (which is probably the most common ASCII extension) so that may well the character set that you are dealing with.