While I was pruning my old posts I saw that a few of them had special characters littered throughout the text. I was afraid I would have to go to each post and correct them but I knew there had to be a smarter way. Here’s the winning tip:

  1. Open up ‘wp-config.php’ from the root directory of your WordPress installation.
  2. Add ‘//’ at the very beginning of these two lines:
    define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
    define('DB_COLLATE', '');

(Originally from http://hansengel.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/wordpress-unicode-and-s/)