Character entity woes

I’ve got some text coming in from a database. I get:

’ “ ” instead of single and double quotes.

I’m not sure that all fonts even support left and right double quotation marks (?).

at any rate… is there a relatively simple way to resolve this? maybe scanning the strings for the character entities and replacing them with single or double quotes?

does anyone know if Flash can recognize the ASCII entity number (e.g. &#8217) more readily than the ASCII entity name (e.g. ’)??
That may be a moot point as i would have to somehow convert/replace with the entity number anyways…

i’m kind of new to working with strings… if scanning/replacing is even possible, can someone help with some code?