help with character code issues

Hello all,
I have an app where I am reading in text from a Word doc and an Excel spreadsheet, and some of the text contains characters such as "smart" quotes and apostrophes, different kinds of hyphens (dashes) and various European characters with accents and diacritical marks. I need to identify such characters and convert them to "straight" quotes, apostrophes, hyphens and unaccented characters respectively (yes, I know the meaning of a word can change depending on whether a character is accented or not, but that is OK for my purposes - for example if I come across "café" I want to convert it to "cafe").

How can I use the Encoding namespace (or whatever other functionality is appropriate) to loop through a given string and get the Unicode values for each character? Once I have the Unicode value of a character to be replace, I'll want to replace it with the appropriate character.

Take a look at the Encoding.Convert method.