not2easy - 5:20 am on Jul 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

The best way to avoid this problem is to make sure that your browser isn't misreading your page's charset, and that what the page says its character set is, really is what it is encoded as. In notepad++ you can convert a page that is encoded in iso-8859-1 (for example) to utf-8. The problem is that some character sets use "curly quotes" which look like a superscript comma, a dot with a tail. Down in the lower right corner Notepad++ shows the page encoding (If I recall correctly). I haven't used Notepad++ for a few years now, but I used to appreciate its ability to convert character sets of a page's encoding.
If any parts of your pages may have been copied from Windows documents they are most likely not encoded in either utf-8 or iso-8859-1; Windows default encoding has characters that look wonky on most browsers. Be careful of using what Windows calls utf-8 also, because in their Notepad program it can look fine, but be using utf-8 with BOM (the byte order mark)that you won't see until you view the page in a browser.