When a user fills out an appraisal .. they are copying large amounts of text from word documents and pasting it into the input boxes while going through the appraisal process..  If i write some php to grab that data and then echo it out, i am seeing a bunch of odd characters like squares and certain quotes are either missing or duplicated etc.   What functions are you guys using to clean up the data before you display it back out to the user in your appraisal pages?  They appear to be clean and free of these extra characters in  your display but a standard php echo has the problem.