A Nagging Technical Question

[MagnusTrask]

This is confusing me:

Count Petofi: Papa, can you hear me?Â
                   Papa, can you see me?
                   Papa can you find me in the night?

That's an old caption of Ms. Dreadful's, and if it quotes correctly here, you should be able to see a lot of strange capital A's with circumflexes over them.   Even my old captions have had them, sometimes with small circles over the A's instead.

It's a small issue, but, MD or Midnite, why did this happen?  It's distracting and I like to eliminate even tiny sources of irritation in my life, since I have enough big ones to deal with.....

[Mysterious Benefactor]

We can blame our previous host for that. Back when I reworked several tables in the database just before we'd upgraded the forum's system from SMF 1.0 to 1.1 in May '07, those bizarre characters were substituted for extra spaces in posts (though, strangely enough, NOT in ALL posts with extra spaces) when the tables were reintroduced into the database by using our old host's interface with the database (which was the only way to do it with them because the tables were so large). And trust me, no one is more aggravated by that having happened than I am, and I'm hoping to figure out an easier way to eliminate the problem than going into every affected post to delete the problem characters out manually...