Re: SOLVED=> is ' or " different in MS-Word then ascII?

Roger Spears wrote:

Hello Everybody, I have found a solution and/or the root of the problem. I googled on the topic of "MS-Word" + "smart quotes". That lead me to this site: http://www.rpgtimes.net/rpgtimes/guide.php?guide=1 It seems that the default for Word is to have smart quotes to "on". When you have smart quotes "on" it replaces the ordinary straight quotes with a left specific and right specific quote. To correct this: Go into TOOLS>AUTO-CORRECT>AUTO-FORMAT>remove checkmark from "replace straight quotes with smart quotes". Also in TOOLS>AUTO-CORRECT you must remove the line in AUTO-REPLACE about replacing ... with three dots that are closer together. Once I did that, my problem was solved!!!!!!!! Thanks to all who have helped today. I appreaciate it!!

I'm happy for you :-), but didn't you say you were taking input from visitors? Can you force them to turn smart quotes off? To me it looks like you're pointing out a general problem that anyone might run into: visitors may copy characters into a Web form that are not entirely safe to display in an HTML page. That would be anything except plain ASCII. That would include smart quotes and a lot of accented letters that don't normally occur in English. I haven't thought this through before, but I think the safest thing to do would be to replace thos characters with their HTML entity equivalents at some point before you display them. For the smart quotes, the entities would be ‘ &rsqou; “ and ” Of course, you could replace them with dumb quotes instead, but the smart quotes look better. That's why MS word and other word processors do what they do.

BEFORE I changed these two Word settings, when writing to the database, the ord() (ordinate) value for the left quote was 147 and the right quote was 148. When being retrieved from the database, the ord() (ordinate) value for the left quote was 17 and the right quote was 19. Thanks again to everyone who offered help! Roger