So, as a result of bad programming, my database got FILLED with strange characters like this:
’ … – “ †‘
These characters are representations of double quotes, single quotes, triple dots, etc… in different encoding formats.
I read that his happens when you copy lines from programs like Word, Wordpad, etc…
It has something to do with using latin-1 as the collation in your database. The many sites that talks about this issue recommends converting your table to use UTF-8.
Anyways, after hours of tedious research, I found a way to fix an existing table that has these weird characters in them.
The code is like this:
update <table_name> set <field> = replace(<field>,'’','\''); update <table_name> set <field>= replace(<field>,'…','...'); update <table_name> set <field>= replace(<field>,'–','-'); update <table_name> set <field>= replace(<field>,'“','"'); update <table_name> set <field>= replace(<field>,'â€','"'); update <table_name> set <field>= replace(<field>,'‘','\''); update <table_name> set <field>= replace(<field>,'•','-'); update <table_name> set <field>= replace(<field>,'‡','c');
replace <table_name> with table name, and <field> with the field you are targeting.
This runs through the database and replaces all the strange characters with normal ones.