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Converting "bad" characters to their equivalent without a direct string.Replace and a list

I have done my research and everything I've found either does nothing or is too Leeroy Jenkins and replaces everything else that it shouldn't. It's possible that I'm phrasing everything wrong in my search and so coming up with nothing.
I have to replace all the wrong characters that rich text programs (and older programs) autocorrect for the user because the user then copy/pasts directly into a web form.
For example, the "funky" apostrophe (’) converted to the regular apostrophe (') and the quotation marks and everything else.
I've tried UTF en/decoding, diacritic removal (not at all what I need), and a direct brute force string.Replace isn't reasonable, really.
Here's some example text that has all the bad stuff:
"They’re taking the hobbits to Isengaurd with bad apostrophe’s instead of good one's. It’s just how they roll."
Note that the only good apostrophe is in one's and already have one rendered result of this (It’s) so I need to convert it back (along with all the other baddies) without a string.Replace and a list of characters to watch for.
What ought I be doing here?
To clarify: I need to convert the bad characters to good equivalents before data is submitted AND I need to catch existing stuff that was rendered after it was saved. So I need to do two things here.

Displaying phone format XAML/c#

In my windows phone project, I would like the user to enter his phone number in xxx-xxx-xxxx format. The country code it not required. I tried to implement regex, but i am not getting it right. I just want it to be displayed to the user as he enters it, nothing more, nothing less. This is what I have used
^\(\d{3}\) ?\d{3}( |-)?\d{4}$
But no matter what i put in, I always get this error (in this case 5) "Unrecognized escape sequence". I noticed, this is only with reference to the oblique. When I add a "" after it, the error goes away, but I do not get what I want. Is there a special way to input numbers in the textbox in than manner, on the XAML level?
Thanks in advance!

Put your regex inside verbatim string and also put the space, hyphen inside a group and make it as optional.
#"^\(\d{3}\)([- ]?)\d{3}\1\d{4}$"
DEMO

For testing your RegEx you can use this site: http://www.regexlib.com/RETester.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1.
For your xxx-xxx-xxxx format I would use it:^\d{3}-?\d{3}-?\d{4}$

Why are some unintended symbols added to my string?

I wrote a console application which fetches strings from some fields in a Sharepoint list. Then I simply write the strings to console. This works fine for the most fields. There is one MultiLineTextField with RichText enabled where i had to remove all the html-tags, that causes this issue.
Even after all the tags are removed the strings seem to contain question marks which were never added to the string. The most weird thing about this is when I set a breakpoint and look into the string's value there are no question marks, but they suddenly appear on the console output.
The only thing I could think of was to Trim the string. Because sometimes they appear in front of the actual string sometimes they are at the and of it, but never in between.
So this is what I tried:
myString = myString.Trim();
myString = myString.Replace("?",string.Empty);
But this does not solve the issue. Besides this would not be a smart solution in case one of the strings would be supposed to contain question marks. For detailed code please see the link above.
Also Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(myString)) gives me the following output:
4oCLTWVobCwgRWllciwgV2Fzc2VyLCBIYWNrZmxlaXNjaCA=

There are probably some non-printing unicode (or possibly low ASCII) characters in the end of the string. The console has a different encoding, and will often render such as ?. Basically: use the indexer (yourString[n]) or yourString.ToCharArray() to investigate what is actually in the string aroung the location of the ?.
With the edit, we can see that the string has a zero-width space (decimal 8203) at the start:

Sounds like you're maybe having a problem with unicode characters. Chances are you're outputting the string as ASCII instead of Unicode. Take a look at this question as it sounds like you may be experiencing the same problem.

Keyboard hook in c#

I want to develop a keystroke converter which will convert any keystroke into my local language. For example, if user type "a" then it will be replaced with it's corresponding unicode letter "\u0995"
I used a code similar to: https://stackoverflow.com/global-low-level-keyboard-hook-freezing-in-c-net-3-5 There, i edited as follows:
// MessageBox.Show("Test"); // I do not want this so commented
int vkCode = Marshal.ReadInt32(lParam);
Console.WriteLine((Keys)(vkCode + 2));
SendKeys.Send("mmm"); // mmm will be my desired unicode character
Now, i open any application and type anything i get both the typed letter and "mmm".
For example, if i type: abcd then i get output as: mmmcmmmdmmmemmmf .........[output]
Now my question is,
1) How can i edit this code to send a unicode letter instead of a letter ? ( I mean, if i type "p", then i want other applications should receive unicode character similar to this unicode character: "0996"
2) How to make sure only the unicode character is sent to other application, the typed character must not be appended. I mean, i don't want the unicode character and typed english letter as in the output above[output]

1) How can i edit this code to send a
unicode letter instead of a letter ?
SendKeys.Send() can send Unicode Indic characters too e.g.
SendKeys.Send("খ");
If you want to use Unicode code to send the character, then
SendKeys.Send('\u0996'.ToString());
2) How to make sure only the unicode
character is sent to other
application?
If the code is inside a KeyDown event function, you can suppress the actual key being typed by using following just after SendKeys.Send() statement:
e.Handled == true;

AFAIK, hooking is for monitoring, so not sure if its correct approach for what you are trying to do. But in your code, perhaps you can skip calling next hook "CallNextHookEx" and that may swallow the key typed. Mind you that you should swallow conditionally otherwise you may block keys such as ALT and CTL.

I'm not quite sure, but I think you can interrupt the chain if you don't call CallNextHookEx but return a null pointer instead. But that this is something you should rather not do usually ;)
Best Regards,
Oliver Hanappi

Skip calling CallNextHookEx to prevent a particular key event from propagating.
Re: using SendKeys to enter Unicode input: "If your application is intended for international use with a variety of keyboards, the use of Send could yield unpredictable results and should be avoided." -MSDN Basically I think SendKeys doesn't explicitly support sending Unicode input.
Have you looked at Microsoft Text Services Framework instead of this approach you are trying? I think it is basically purpose built to address what you are trying to do.

C# Special Characters in String Crashing Program

I have a slight problem with a path:
"D:\\Music\\DJ Ti%C3%ABsto\\Tiesto\\Adagio For Strings (Spirit of London).mp3"
"D:\\Music\\Dj Tiësto\\Tiesto\\Adagio For Strings (Spirit of London).mp3"
Currently, when it sends that path to my Audio Library, it cannot open the path. (the reason for it crashing is trying to assign a -1 to a trackbar...but it's irrelevant).
So I'm wondering, is there anyway to prevent C# from switching special characters with %[code]? I've done a .Replace for "[" and "]", but I rather not have to look up every single special character, and add a line of code to prevent it. Is there anyway around this?

Call Uri.UnescapeDataString.
By the way, when putting paths in strings, you can put an # sign before the string to tell the compiler not to process escape codes, like this: #"D:\Music\DJ Tiësto\Tiesto\Adagio For Strings (Spirit of London).mp3". This way, you don't need to double up every backslash.