I see a lot of garbage had crept in over the course of using different publishing platforms, editors, and other tools. I’m sure there’s a better way to do this (like a stored procedure in MySQL) but I managed to hack back a lot of the weeds with stuff like this:
mysql> UPDATE crank_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '’','\'');
I probably spent more time trying to do this in SequelPro and wrestling with syntax, none of which was necessary: the line above works in the commandline environment. It seems to have worked once but I don’t think I saw the status message saying to: I didn’t realize it til I saw a nonsense test string staring back at me.
Just one more thing that should Just Work.