A long long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had a client that had written all of her pages’ text in Microsoft Word, and pasted them directly into her content management system. This resulted in over 50 pages of content that would display nasty characters in some browsers. Back then, I went through each and every page and replaced those nasty characters with their cross-browser alternatives. Nowadays, I’d use a schmexy MySQL query like the one below:

<?php
$find_and_replace_query = mysql_query("UPDATE `table` SET `field` =
REPLACE(`field`, 'string_to_find', 'string_to_replace')");
?>

That’s it, you ask? Yep! Sure beats the grueling process of updating 50 pages one at a time.