bad characters in database

Was wondering if anyone could help me. I have a
database with some bad characters in it -- some users
had entered MS Word smart quotes, em dashes, foreign
characters, and they look like gibberish coming out of
the database.

What's the best way to replace these characters? I
thought I might be able to run a simple SQL UPDATE
command, but some of the gibberish for different
characters looks the same, and it would clobber them
all.

I have a feeling there's some sort of ASCII code or
unicode solution to this problem, but I could use a
little push in the right direction.

Thanks.

Noah.




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