Converting/stripping non-ASCII characters

[Si]

It's been a while since I had an ASP problem I couldn't solve but here goes...

I'm trying to catch some characters in a string before they are entered into a database that are not ASCII and convert them to ASCII characters. The characters in question are the angular double quotes but this could be associated with similar occurences. I want to check for left angular double quotes [“] or right angular double quotes [“] and replace them with straight double quotes ["].

(I'm not actually storing the HTML equivalents - they are simply there to give you an idea of which characters I'm on about.)

Does anyone know of a way of catching these buggers? I've tried using chr(8220) (the numeric code for one of the illegal characters apparently) but ASP has a problem working with numbers outside the character map.

Cheers!

[Thing]

Funny you should ask. I ran into this same problem about 2 weeks ago. You can actually just paste the quote right into your ASP script with a REPLACE and it will take care of them. I tried using the ASCII value as well with no luck:

myvar = REPLACE(myvar, "”", """)

I hope were talking about the same quotes here, as I never really knew their official name.

[vgarcia]

Off Topic:

Man I haven't done an ASP post in a while!

The code below should replace the characters:

'opening double quotes
myvar = replace(myvar, chr(147), chr(34))
'closing double quotes
myvar = replace(myvar, chr(148), chr(34))

For future reference, you can open up charmap.exe and check the "Advanced View" checkbox to view more characters. In this case, you might want to look at the "Windows: Western" character set (the default in charmap is "Unicode"), since that's probably your server's default.

I hope were talking about the same quotes here, as I never really knew their official name.

That would be an "opening double quote" and "closing double quote" if you're talking about the example you posted .

[Si]

Cheers guys! I didn't realise I could just paste the characters into my ASP script. I'll give both methods a try.

[Thing]

That would be an "opening double quote" and "closing double quote" if you're talking about the example you posted .

We were calling them "fancy quotes"

[vgarcia]

We were calling them "fancy quotes"

http://alistapart.com/articles/emen/

More about typography than you'd ever want to know