Thanks for the input you guys.

This data came direct from a manufacturer. It was like pulling teeth to get them to get it to me, so I'm kind of stuck with it. I've been using OpenOffice and TextWrangler for editing.

Looks like I'll go back to TextWrangler forums and try to find a way to detect/replace all special characters.

I totally forgot about ckeditor, that is indeed what I use. Man, I wish there was a way to simply trigger those filters on the entire db!