I have a couple escaped characters in user-entered fields that I can't figure out. I know they are the "smart" single and double quotes, but I don't know how to search for them in mysql. The characters in ruby, when output from Ruby look like \222, \223, \224 etc irb> "\222".length => 1 So - do you know how to search for these in mysql? When I look in mysql, they look like '?'. I'd like to find all records that have this character in the text field. I tried mysql> select id from table where field LIKE '%\222%' but that did not work. Some more information - after doing a mysqldump, this is how one of the characters is represented - '\\xE2\\x80\\x99'. It's the smart single quote. Ultimately, I'm building an RTF file and the characters are coming out completely wrong, so I'm trying to replace them with 'dumb' quotes for now. I was able to do a gsub(/\222\, "'"). Thanks.