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

Why not try a regex in javascript against what Gumbo identified as "... character � ... the REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (U+FFFD)" after rendering the webpage - this way you will not have to mess with the DB (which you seem very reluctant to do) and whatever minor performance penalty is offloaded to the client side.