Punctuation is garbled—displayed as code

Are you pasting content into your posts or pages?

Yes, but all displayed well with my old theme, for years. Now that old theme seems to be broken with wp 3.2.1, so I had to switch themes. I chose Twenty Eleven.

Strangely, I have had periods of time when viewing the blog works without the garbled punctuation. That confuses me, as it shouldn’t be an intermittent problem.

If it IS due to pasting the content (albeit long ago), can I globally correct somehow? I have hundreds of posts!

Thanks for your attention.

The most obvious culprit is content pasted from another application or word processor such as MS Word. You could try using the Search & Replace plugin to replace all occurrences of specific character groups such as a€?.
https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/search-and-replace/

Thanks a million! I’ll get that plugin and that should do it. Didn’t know such a useful thing existed. Thank you!

esmi, thanks again. That was just what I needed. Fixed!