Monty,
It appears Yahoo Mail and/or Firefox 3 truncated my earlier
message. Here is what I sent.
Regards,
Joel
--- On Sat, 7/19/08, Joel Kallman <joel_kallman yahoo.com> wrote:
To: ODTUG-WEBDEV-Lfatcity.com
Date: Saturday, July 19, 2008, 10:28 AM
Hi Monty,
This is a great question and a problem I've encountered
before.
I have found the majority of "odd" characters when
people copy and paste from MS Word are the double-quotes.
These aren't your ordinary double-quotes - they are LEFT
DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK (Unicode 0x201c) and RIGHT DOUBLE
QUOTATION MARK (Unicode 0x201d).
These characters can be represented by code points in some
database character sets (AL32UTF8, WE8MSWIN1252) but not in
others (US7ASCII, WE8ISO8859P1).
I was smoked by this years ago when we had a documentation
writer prepare some help text for us. She used MS Word 2000
to author the help text and then she would copy and paste it
into our Web interface. This created issues for us when we
would export and import the data. We finally figured out it
was primarily due to these quotes from MS Word. We wrote a
function specifically for her - to scrub the data that she
would be pasting in, and would inevitably include these
oddball characters. Her name was Sheryl, we wrote a
function called 'sheryl_scrub', and 8 years ago, we still
refer to this problem as needing the 'sheryl_scrub'
function.
Back then, the Oracle database didn't have any regular
expression functions, so we had to do this in a brute force
manner. But we were primarily looking for these quotation
characters. Today, the Oracle database has REGEXP_REPLACE.
Off the top of my head, you *may* be able to get by with
something like:
regexp_replace(p_value, '[^[:print:]]')
Good luck.
Regards,
Joel
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--
Author: Joel Kallman
INET: joel_kallmanyahoo.com
Fat City Hosting, San Diego, California -- http://www.fatcity.com
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