Re: Smart Quotes not so smart

Robert Cummings wrote: >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. > > John Walker's insight might be a good lead on some more information on exactly what these are, even if it doesn't directly solve the problem. I can only guess that their 'smart quotes' exported to HTML from Office apps are the same 'smart quotes' in your database... who knows :p http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/ Travis Doherty