Sometimes automated tools like my favorite, MySQL Workbench, don't always migrate extended characters properly. I had a problem where a particular field would truncate after the German ΓΌ, the u with the umlaut.
There is a great article that shows how all of the Acquia sites are architected. In that article, it is mentioned that Services is used quite a bit to power REST endpoints. Here is a really, really, useful tidbit that I don't want to forget which comes from that article.
Here's a function that replaces <i> and <b> with <em> and <strong>. This comes in very handy in migrations. In the future, it would be nice to also convert <font> tags.