character conversion problem

hi, i'm in a bit of a bind and i'm hoping someone can help me. i'm working on a project in which some data was saved into a postgresql database. It was copied from quark express and entered through a php interface. Unfortunately some of the records have a strange character encoding. For example, apostrophes were converted to %u2019. All the charactes seenm to begin with %u and have 4 numbers after that. i've seen this kind of thing in word documents. i don't know what it is, but i think it's the extended ascii character set. Anyway, i'm not sure what to do about it. i would like to find a way to convert this to simple ascii permanently or else find a way for it to display correctly in html and i'm hoping to do this in php. i would also like to find a way to prevent this from creeping into the system. i'm sorry i don't understand the problem well enough, and i'm sorry if i'm using the wrong words to describe this problem. Anyway i really appreciate the help. ~darcy w. christ 1000camels in a courtyard