I have exported one of my website data files as a CSV.. In the descriptions column, the apostrophes (') in the text have been replaced with "small boxes with question marks". Can you please advise how we replace these characters back to apostrophes.
2 Answers
Unicode issue with an HTML Title, question mark? 65533; Look at this previous question on stackoverflow, as it addresses your issue
see Jeff's article about Unicode http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/i-entity-unicode.html
which references this link and you should read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
and when you fix it>>>> http://www.cafepress.com/nucleartacos/317769
When exporting to CSV files, it's not only important to understand encoding, as datatoo has already mentioned, but also quite a few other things, that might introduce data corruptions even stranger than the question marks you mention.
I've written an in depth article about it here: http://theonemanitdepartment.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/the-absolute-minimum-everyone-working-with-data-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-file-types-encoding-delimiters-and-data-types-no-excuses/

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