Strange Characters

[jason97673]

Not sure if this would be in the right category because it could be a database, PHP, or HTML problem.

 

I dont know how to explain with words, so look at the attached picture.

 

http://sykotic-designz.org/strange.JPG

 

That is basically just an article stored in a DB. Now you see those strange characters? Is there a way to get rid of them? Basically all the data entered in the system has been copied and pasted which I know makes those characters appear because when I copy " ' " from a PDF to a text file it displays weird also.

 

I dont know if I should change the type of field in the Database from text to varchar or text to something else perhaps, or something in the PHP code I use can get rid of those.

 

Any help appreciated, thanks.

[Wildbug]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_quotes

 

Whatever source you copied that from is using non-standard apostrophes, probably a "smart quote."  If you can find out what character it really is (find the ASCII code), you can replace it with a normal apostrophe.

[jason97673]

Yeah I have heard of ASCII but is changing every single entry in the database manually the only way to go about doing it?

[Wildbug]

Eh, no, not manually.  Once you figure out what character you need to replace, just run UPDATE table SET column=REPLACE(column, CHAR(?), "'") on the table where ? will be the ASCII code of the character you need to replace.

 

You'll probably have to figure out the ASCII value manually.  You can just make a new entry in the table with ONLY a weird character as the content and maybe do a SELECT ORD(content) FROM table WHERE id=?....

 

Let me know if it works.

[jason97673]

Ok here is what I have

 

UPDATE books SET description=REPLACE(description, CHAR(&#39), "’")

 

Description being the column that has the strange characters in. And books is the table

 

But it has an error in syntax near &#39), "’")

[Wildbug]

Hmm, CHAR(39) is an apostrophe, so that isn't going to help, I think.

[jason97673]

Hm well actually, I got help somewhere else and in my HTML I just had to change

 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

 

to

 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />

 

And that fixed everything, but thanks for the help anyway! 

[Wildbug]

Cool... glad you got it sorted.