[h-e-w] Changing smart quotes into ordinary quotes

[Tolkin, Steve]

Summary:  There has been a change in how emacs handles a paste of text
that includes so-called smart quotes and other special characters.   How
can I turn them into ordinary ASCII characters? 

Details:
I am running GNU Emacs 22.3.1 on of 2008-09-96 on SOFT-MJASON. On
windows XP SP2.  This used to work in emacs 21.  

Sometimes a Microsoft Word document, Outlook email, or other programs
will use special characters outside the ASCII range to represent open
and close quotations marks, apostrophe, dash, etc. 
I select the text that contains those characters.  
In emacs version 21 when I pasted them into an emacs buffer they became
characters such as octal 223 and octal 224.  Now they become these
characters.

Char: " (342396, #o1234574, #x5397c)        (Open quotation mark) 
Char: " (342397, #o1234575, #x5397d)        (Close quotation mark) 
#x53979 apostrophe
#x53973 dash

I have a macro that I found a while ago in
http://www.eskimo.com/~seldon/dotemacs.el that starts like this:
(defun hack-charset-netscape-to-oem (start end)
  (interactive "r")
  (save-excursion
    (format-replace-strings '(

(In my actual _emacs init file there is a single character that displays
as \222 i.e. octal 222.
But in this email I typed it as 4 separate characters.) 

I tried adding these 2 lines; 
                              ("\U0005397c" . "\"") ; open double quote
                              ("\U0005397d" . "\"") ; close double quote


But they fail, saying, "unsupported Unicode code point U+5397c" for the
first line above.
(I found that format for Unicode characters in some emacs help.)

What am I doing wrong?  

Is there a list of the common characters to replace with their near
ASCII equivalent?


Thanks, 
Steve
-- 
Steven Tolkin    
There is nothing so practical as a good theory.  Comments are by me, 
not Fidelity Investments, its subsidiaries or affiliates.