Fellow Monks:

I’m writing a CGI that includes a large <textarea> field as an input. I need the final output of the script to be simple clean text, but some of the users are going to be pasting their input from MS Word, bringing unholy characters into play.

I’m not concerned about really weird symbols, like the smiley face, but I am concerned about “smart quotes” for example. (Quotes that know if they're begining or ending)

Is there a Perl library, or Unix command, that will strip the funny characters away and replace “smart quotes” with "simple quotes"?