Problems with ' and "

Commas won't validate until manually replaced with the same thing.

[Adam5000]

Mystery to me.

I'm validating my pages and getting errors where the commas and quotation marks are.

The error messages read non SGML character.

The part I don't understand is, when I backspace through the comma or quotation mark that the validator doesn't like and rekey it, it works.

What's happening?

[alias]

I suppose you're probably copying and pasting that content from somewhere, let's assume Word. That software (or sometimes people who wrote that document) sometimes uses the different "quotes "like ` or ” or ’ or ` or “ a different hyphen, which sometimes looks like a normal hyphen.

By different I mean not one from the common ASCII char table, but one from an extended keyboard or characted set.

[Super_B]

@Adam5000

+1 to what @alias said, and also it needs to be added that quotes (") are technically for HTML attribute markup, like:

<img src="...">

so you should use " in your text like so:

<strong title="The British Bulldog">Winston Churchill</strong> said, &quot;We shall never surrender.&quot;

Outputs: Winston Churchill said, "We shall never surrender."

[Adam5000]

That's correct. Very astute of you. Most of the content of my website is written and created on Word and WordPerfect and pasted into notepad.

Is there an easy fix?

[Adam5000]

Astute is the wrong word. I meant perceptive.

[LifeinAsia]

Turn off smart quotes in Word. (I assume WP has something like that as well, although haven't used it in years.) That's one of the first things I do every time I do with a fresh install of Office.

If you get Word documents from freelancers, you'll have to do a replace on the entire file before uploading.

[jdMorgan]

When finished creating a document in Word, click "File" in the top menu bar, then "Save as" and choose "Plain Text (ASCII)." You will likely get warnings on the non-ASCII characters at this point. This would be a good time to globally search-and-replace them with the standard ASCII characters.

Also, under File -> Options -> Proofing -> AutoFormat, consider turning off the "Replace with smart quotes" and "Replace hyphen with dash" options. (This is the Word 2010 click-path; earlier versions are likely different).

Even with these changes, Word produces some fairly awful HTML with a lot of bloat. Consider using a good WYSIWYG HTML editor (many are free, such as SeaMonkey Composer, bundled with the SeaMonkey browser from Mozilla or Nvu, also a Mozilla Compser derivative).

Jim