Changing site to UTF8

[nnhubbard]

I would really like to switch my site over to using UTF8 character set, as we are using iso-8859-1. When I make the switch, all of my " and ' characters are getting changed to a question mark, like it does not know what to do with them. Now, I am not about to go through the entire site to change these. Anyone know why this happens, and an easy way to fix it?

[Fang]

You will have to change them all and probably many other characters.

[KDLA]

Depending on the editing program you use, you can do a global find and replace in the text (not code) the offending characters, and replace them with the UTF8 compliant equivalent.

[nnhubbard]

Ok, but what I don't understand is, since UTF8 is able to display "smart quotes" from MS Word, why, if they have been added in iso-8859-1, and then I switch to UTF8, do the quotes change to garbage characters? Why would they just not show?

[Fang]

Only ASCII characters are encoded the same in UTF8 and ISO-8859-1. The extended characters, i.e. 'smart quote' have different encodings.