php remove/identify this symbol �

Question

EDIT:

Ok I have some data (A ton of data) being pulled from a MySQL DB Table, nothing special about how the data is entered. When parsing the data and re-displaying

Answer 1

The character � is the REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (U+FFFD). It is used when there was an error within an UTF code:

FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER

• used to replace an incoming character whose value is unknown or unrepresentable in Unicode

In most cases it means that some data is interpreted with an UTF encoding while the data is not encoded with that encoding but a different one.