I’ve created a very, very, simple online converter for special characters.  I’ll often get handed off a Word document with text to be included in a website.  Word by default will create curly quotes, and it may have a myriad of special characters littered in there.  So I made a simple script that replaces special characters with their ASCII entity counterparts.

You Simply copy and paste the text into the large textbox, click on the button and voila!  It does have some limited conversion of ampersands.  It will only convert and ampersands to & if there is a space in from of it to remove the risk of converting any entities that may be already in the code.  So while “Tea & crumpets” will convert “M&M” won’t.

Special Character Converter