Re: Smart Quotes not so smart

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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

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