How do I convert Word smart quotes and em dashes in a string?

I have a form with a textarea. Users enter a block of text which is stored in a database. Occasionally a user will paste text from Word containing smart quotes or emdashes. Those characters appear in the database as: –, ’, “ ,†What function should I call on the input string to convert smart quotes to regular quotes and emdashes to regular dashes? I am working in PHP. Update: Thanks for all of the great responses so far. The page on Joel's site about encodings is very informative: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html Some notes on my environment: The MySQL database is using UTF-8 encoding. Likewise, the HTML pages that display the content are using UTF-8 (Update:) by explicitly setting the meta content-type. On those pages the smart quotes and emdashes appear as a diamond with question mark. Solution: Thanks again for the responses. The solution was twofold: - Make sure the database and HTML files were explicitly set to use UTF-8 encoding. - Use `htmlspecialchars()` instead of `htmlentities()`.