$var wrote:The feed itself doesn't have any funky characters,
Actually, it does. The correct representation of your text is:
... the emcee’s instructions were clear.“Hold up ...
And this contains two funky chars: the ’ (unicode 8217, instead of the regular ' single quote) and “ (unicode 8220, instead of the regular " double quote).
These funky characters most likely come from some noob copy/pasting stuff from MS Word, which has the tendency to replace regular quotes with funky ones.
but when I pass it through the site (which IS ISO-5899-1 encoded) I get this:
Well there's your problem: those quote characters can't be represented in iso-8859-1. It's an ansi encoding, and only contains limited characters. Just like Chinese or Klingon characters can't be expressed in iso-8859-1, neither can the exotic characters above.
Anything you can suggest about this?
Use utf-8 everywhere: in your html headers, in your content, and in your database collations.
If you still prefer an ansi encoding, then why the heck would you pick the extremely limited iso-8859-1 ? (as oposed to windows-1252 for example, which contains pretty much all iso-8859-1 characters plus some funky ones such as the strange quote thingies).
Alternatively (or on top of that), replace freaky quote chars with regular ones in any content.