Re: Smart Quotes not so smart

On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 20:36 -0600, Larry Garfield wrote: > I've run into this sort of issue a few times before, and never found a good > solution. Now a client has been hit with it and is asking for a solution, > and I'm not convinced there is one. :-) > > Client has a large MS SQL database with lots of data. Some of that data > includes "smart quotes", aka curly quotes, but not real ones. They're the MS > Word character encoding standards? What's that?" smart quotes. On their old > setup (SQL Server 2k, OpenLink ODBC driver, IIS, PHP 4.0.6), they actually > worked just fine. On our old devel setup (the same but with a different ODBC > driver), it worked fine. > > On our new devel setup (SQL Server 2k, OpenTDS ODBC driver, Apache, PHP > 5.1.6), it works fine. On their new live setup, however, (same, but again > not sure of the ODBC driver) they're getting the dreaded squares or question > marks or accented characters that signify a garbled smart quote. I know > they're not unicode characters because Windows, the DB server, and the driver > are all set to either UTF-8 or UTF-16. > > We've tried eliminating middle-men to no avail. I've also tried doing a > find-replace on the smart quote characters before they're inserted into the > database, copying and pasting them from Word, and PHP skips right past them > and enters them into the database. > > All we're left with is MAYBE telling them to dry a different ODBC driver or > else fixing the data by hand. I don't like either option, myself. Does > anyone have any better ideas to suggest? Any idea what those smart quotes > actually are, and if they exist in ANY valid character set other than Word > itself? There's a few different charsets that support them. Either way, can you open up some content that has them using a hex editor and tell us the hex codes for the bytes? That will help determine what charset. Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------'