Why do symbols like apostrophes and hyphens get replaced with black diamonds on my website?

Question

A website I\'ve made has a few problems... On one of the pages, wherever there\'s an apostrophe (\') or a dash (-), the symbol gets replaced with a

Answer 1

If you are editing HTML in Notepad you should use "Save As" and alter the default "Encoding:" selection at the botom of the dialog to UTF-8. you should also include-

This un-ambiguously sets the correct character set and informs the browser.