Is it possible to strip special characters from an exml feed?

Cheers everyone. I recently installed the evanced importer module created by Worthington Libraries to be able to import Evanced Feeds as content.

The module works very well. Kudos to their whole team.

After you install the module, you create a content type for the feed, and after you enter the URL to your exml feed, the contents of the feed are converted to your content type. The problem I'm having is that special characters are being displayed instead of some characters.

For example, instead of an apostrophe, as in "Tom's", I get a character that literally looks like a square with two rows of numbers; 00 on the top row, and 92 on the bottom row.

I want to be clear, the problem I'm having has nothing to do with the module. It is entirely due to the content of the retrieved feed. If you type the feed into a browser and look at the returned content, the special characters are there.

Evanced tells me that at this time, the only editor they have for users cannot be configured for plain text only. My folks who enter these events, hundreds of them each month, create their lists in Micro$oft Word and Excel, and then copy/paste them into the editor in Evanced.

My manager would like this to be done programmatically, without having to re-engineer the way these folks enter the events. I've spent 6 hours or so trying, but can't find a way to do it. I can use custom input for the body in contemplate, but I'd have to find every instance of a special character and write PHP code to replace it with the plain text equivalent.

The info is actually displayed to the end user by means of a view. I created a custom tpl.php file to remove the special characters, but because of the encoding difference, I can't even paste in the character I want to replace. And again, I'd have to account for every instance.

If anyone has run into this before, or has an epiphany on how to care for this, I would be ever grateful if you could steer me in the right direction.