We recently upgraded from CF5 to CF7 and are having a problem
with previously saved text that no longer displays correctly. Some
characters (apparently, non-ASCII characters such as curly
apostrophes and smart quotes) are rendering as boxes or question
marks. We recently upgraded to Oracle 10g from Oracle 8i, but this
problem appears to be independent of the database that the text is
stored in. Here is sample code that will illustrate the problem:
<CFSET string1="Department’s">
<CFSET string2="hey—there">
<CFOUTPUT>
string1 is #string1#
<BR>
string2 is #string2#
</CFOUTPUT>
output looks like this:
string1 is Department?s
string2 is hey?there
These are rendered as boxes when viewed in Internet Explorer.
(They show up as question marks when I copy and paste them here.)
The Demoronize UDF helps *some* of the time, but this is
still happening with a lot of text, especially text that gets
pasted from a website into a form, then saved to a database. Does
anybody have a solution for this? This is breaking my applications
and is incredibly annoying. I'd like to either replace the
problematic characters at the time they are displayed, or replace
them when they are input in the database in the first place (and go
back and update all the previously saved data to replace the
problematic characters with plain text equivalents).
Any suggestions appreciated.