title: any way to detect and remove (or fix) bad characters resulting from bad encoding conversions
body: <p>I am writing a parser. I have taken care of all the encoding conversion to output UTF-8 correctly, but sometimes the source material is incorrect. such as <code>☐</code> or <code>â€tm</code> - the results of bad encoding conversion.</p>
  
  <p>I know this is a long shot - but does anyone know of a list of common strings resulting from bad character conversions, or anything so I don't have to build my own list. </p>
  
  <p>Yes I know I am being lazy, but I read somewhere that makes me a good programmer?</p>