Is there somewhere on the internet where I can find a list of characters like this: †and then there conversion to standard text? I'm having difficulty finding any information about this on the internet because i don't know the proper name for these characters
The characters in your question indicate an encoding error. Make sure your HTML document is set to UTF-8:
HTML5:
<meta charset="utf-8">
HTML <5
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
You might find http://www.utf8-chartable.de/ a good source for all UTF-8 characters.
You want to use the utf8_encode and utf8_decode functions. In case the source of the mangled data is a MySQL database, issue a mysqli set_charset("utf8"), this will help.
You might want to check out this link, it's a link of all the different characters and their names: http://www.fileformat.info/info/charset/UTF-8/list.htm
Although this isn't exactly what you want, it give syou an idea of what you're looking at when you see them. It doesn't include translations though because those are dependent on the type of encoding being done.
It looks like if you're using PHP, you're probably dealing with encodings, so it would depend on if you're encoding characters with UTF-8, US-ASCII, etc. Learn about encodings here: http://php.net/manual/en/xml.encoding.php
Also, check out this link for some tips on how to avoid seeing these characters (if you are indeed seeing them by error): http://webmonkeyuk.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/how-to-avoid-character-encoding-problems-in-php/
Hope this helps!