Cleaning data before turning into WDDX

A program I am supporting is displaying behavior that seems to imply that WDDX format cannot hold those windows specific characters for things like "smart quotes", certain types of dashes, etc. Right now, the application takes user input which is being stored in cfml structures, turns it into wddx, then puts that data into an oracle column/row. Later, the code retrieves the column/record, and before converting it to the cfml structure, uses the CFML MX7 IsWDDX function. This is returning false if the data contains the Windows special characters, but returns true if I manually go into the database and change the characters into something else.

What I need is some code that I could use before ever creating the WDDX record, that would find the Windows specific characters and turn them into some sort of "valid" character.

Does anyone have any pointers to such code, or at least an article discussing this type of thing?

Thank you.