Special (unicode) characters

[sabarnett]

I'm using WeBuilder 2008 to edit htnml email documents. The original email is a Word document that is sent to me. I copy and paste (using PureText) the text from Word in to WeBuilder - that gives me the plain text that I then format.

The problem is that Word uses "smart quotes" and fiddles around wth hyphens and all sorts of other irritations - I assume that these come over as unicode. The text appears fine in WeBuilder but, when sent as an html email, these special characters come out as little square boxes.

Does anyone know of a quick and easy way to scan the text in WeBuilder and replace the unicode characters with their ascii equivalents?

At the moment, I'm scanning the text manually and test sending the email to make sure I've caught everything - a process that's slow and error prone.

Thanks
Steve

[mwb1100]

http://forums.blumentals.net/viewtopic. ... otes#p9677

[sabarnett]

Will give it a try, thanks.

Steve

[Karlis]

These must be word-style quotes and they are indeed unicode characters. If you try to view them in a viewer that does not support Unicode OR is set up to display text in some other encoding, you will not be able to see these. Try to use the good old " instead, at least you will be sure that they will work all the time.

[sabarnett]

That's what I want to do - I was looking for a more automated way of doing it than scanning the text myself - it's inevitable that one or two errors will creep in when you do that kind of thing manually. I may well throw together a 'preview' prgram of my own that doesn't support unicode and copy/paste the html in to there for testing purposes. I just wondered if here was a more elegant way of solving the problem.

Thanks
Steve

[Karlis]

I can suggest search and replace all, nothing better on my mind right now.

[sabarnett]

No problem. WeBuilder is such a terrific product that I'm not going to stress over something as trivial this.

Thanks
Steve

[sabarnett]

Problem solved.

When I looked in to the file, it's not unicode but a range of ANSI characters that not every app can render. Specifically not all email apps can render the characters between 0x80 and 0x9f - which is where the smart quotes fall (code page 1252).

I've thrown together a C# app that replaces these characters with their 'standard' equivalents. I run this as an external application (from the tools menu), replacing the file I'm editing. WeBuilder detects the change and reloads the file.

Works a treat.

Steve