Question
how to handle weird characters in form fields (like bullet points from Word docs)
hi there
lots of my users copy and paste from MS Word documents into a text area
my app takes that form.textarea data and inserts it in a MYSQL db.
when we output that cell from the db, we often find there are ? [question marks] where there once were special characters in the Word doc text.
it seems that bullet points in word docs are the worst offenders.
each time i spot a new one i try to find out the chr() number for it and make a substitiution before the text is stored in the db, but its a bit hit and miss (relies on me spotting it) and its v time consuming
ive tried using functions safetext and demoronize - but they dont seem to do what i need
im sure im not the first person to run into this - any suggestions anyone?
thanks very much indeed for any help you can give.
kind regards
Nick
lots of my users copy and paste from MS Word documents into a text area
my app takes that form.textarea data and inserts it in a MYSQL db.
when we output that cell from the db, we often find there are ? [question marks] where there once were special characters in the Word doc text.
it seems that bullet points in word docs are the worst offenders.
each time i spot a new one i try to find out the chr() number for it and make a substitiution before the text is stored in the db, but its a bit hit and miss (relies on me spotting it) and its v time consuming
ive tried using functions safetext and demoronize - but they dont seem to do what i need
im sure im not the first person to run into this - any suggestions anyone?
thanks very much indeed for any help you can give.
kind regards
Nick
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