Coldfusion not converting accented text or MS Word chars - string

Question

Running Coldfusion 8, I am trying to clean text input before saving to a database that will take things like the MS equivalent of ' " - and accented letters, and converting them.
I have tried replace, REReplace, and various UDFs found on the internet. None seem to work. In fact, I tried this:
<cfscript>
function cleanString(string) {
var newString = string;
newString = replace("'", "'", ALL);
return newString;
}
</cfscript>
The single quote to be replaced above is a MS Word style single quote. Coldfusion threw an error, the error scope said invalid syntax and the single quote in the error scope was a square. If I change it to the chr() form, and replace with ', I get a blank. If I do chr() to the entity, I get a blank.
I am more than certain I have jumped this hurdle before, and not sure why nothing is working now. Is there a new setting in CF8 vs CF7 regarding character encoding that I am missing?

Answer 1

There is a great script for demoronizing (yes, that's a technical term) text copied from MS word and the like. It can be found at CFLib:
http://cflib.org/index.cfm?event=page.udfbyid&udfid=725
I've used it several times, and been happy with it out-of-the-box (though I have added some additions for specific applications).