If you see several weird characters in a row that look like incorrect character encoding there's a good chance it's UTF-8 interpreted as cp-1252. For example, “
in cp-1252 is 0xE2 0x80 0x9C
. Those same 3 bytes in UTF-8, 0xE2809C
is “
.
In MySQL you can do a quick conversion to check:
mysql> SELECT CONVERT(UNHEX(HEX(CONVERT("“" USING LATIN1))) USING utf8mb4);
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| CONVERT(UNHEX(HEX(CONVERT("“" USING LATIN1))) USING utf8mb4) |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| “ |