We have jumbled up text in our database and this has been the case for years. It's impractical for a user to do the fixes using the metadata editing form because there are too many cases. A script that fixes this should be created to fix this issue.
This thread has some really nice ideas
Detecting broken characters in mysql
An example of a broken unicode character is: ">". The character ">" appears broken because it is not a valid Unicode character. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as a mistake when typing or pasting the character, corruption during transmission (most likely the case) or storage, or a lack of support for the character in the font or software being used to display the text.
To find the correct replacement for the character ">", or any other character for the matter, you can look up its Unicode code point. In this case, the code point for ">" is "U+2273", which corresponds to the character "≥". You can then use this code point to search for and replace the broken character with the correct character in the text.