Seems like you got some good answers but this is an XY problem. You are not fixing the real issue which seems to be your site is clobbering ’s and probably anything outside Latin-1. You should fix that. Monkeying around with data in a lossy way ends up causing more pain than it saves.

moo@cow[789]~>perl -MEncode -le 'print encode_utf8(chr(8217) . " or \x
+{2019}")'
’ or ’
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