Quick question; would the Find/Replace command work?
Yes, but it would be tedious.
As a minimum, you could replace each curly quote or apostrophe with a straight ASCII double or single quote and each em-dash with '--', etc. A more advanced approach would replace each non-ASCII character with the corresponding HTML entity. E.g., you would replace the left curly quote with “, the right with ”, etc.
You could also automate the process with the following JavaScript function:
function entify(s) {
var result = '';
for (var x=0; x<s.length; x++) {
var c = s.charCodeAt(x);
result += c < 128 ? s[x] : '&#' + c + ';';
}
return result;
}
Copy it into your browser's JavaScript console and feed it, say, entify('“refugee”'). It will return '“refugee”', which will display correctly (8220 and 8221 are the numeric equivalents of ldquo and rdquo).
But there's an additional problem: It will only display correctly for one generation. As soon as somebody tries to quote your post in a reply, it will be back to the circumflex-A, Euro sign garbage (unless they also perform the entification process.