*^&**^^ Curly Quotes

How did they get there?

[txbakers]

Suddenly curly quotes are showing up in my database as input by the users.

Is there something I missed where web browsers now are using curly quotes instead of straight quotes for the apostrophe character? Can this be controlled by the user in a default font setting in IE somewhere?

More than once this is happening - so that makes it an epidemic.

[lavazza]

Can this be controlled by the user in a default font setting in IE somewhere?

It can be... but, unless you know and trust your users, I'd be tempted to 'validate' their input prior to inserting it in your dB

For a pug-ugly yet functional client-side script, see HTML and Browsers / Character Coding [webmasterworld.com]

[encyclo]

Often it is copy/paste from Word which adds the "curly quotes" It is an issue when using ISO-8859-1/windows-1252 encoding, less so with UTF-8. Are the curly quoates creating particular problems in terms of page display or functionality?

[txbakers]

Yes indeed they are! They show up oddly on the screen, then when they try to manipulate them, the SQL code can't understand the encoding.

I know about the copy/paste from Word and try to discourage that practice, but this latest issue was direct input into the browser!

How could that happen?

[txbakers]

Lavazza - thanks for that script - that will work great. I'll just make it server side and add it to one of our existing validation functions.