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Posted by hcacalendar at Mar 15, 2010, 4:52:43 AM

Apostrophe becomes question mark, double quote becomes single
When I enter an apostrophe, the calendar shows a question mark. When I enter a double quote, the calendar shows a single quote. How come?
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BillWhite36

Posted by support at Mar 16, 2010, 10:27:56 AM

Re: Apostrophe becomes question mark, double quote becomes single
The reason this happens is generally a character coding problem. I'm guessing you probably entered this text into a Word document (or similar) and pasted it onto the site.

The mark shows up when a character gets lost in translation. We recommend that you type text straight onto the site whenever possible.

Here's the technical explanation if case you're having insomnia wink

It happens when the browser sends us content w/ the encoding type set to latin-1 (or iso-8859-1), but the text that was cut and pasted into the field was created using an app set to a different character encoding. By default the localendar.com website sends all content out using the latin-1 encoding. This is basically a code that tells the browser to use a certain character set to display the data representing the text. Most Microsoft Windows apps use a slightly different encoding. When you cut and paste into a text area from a Windows app (or from any 3rd party app set to use a different character encoding) and hit submit, you are sending us data that does not correspond to anything in the latin-1 set, so the standard way of handling this by most web apps is to convert the character to a '?'.

The way to avoid this problem is to:

make sure you are always cutting and pasting text in from an app set to use plain text (ASCII) or latin-1 (iso-8859-1) encodings. This may be a setting you can set in your word processors (as to where to set it, I can't say ... different for all apps).

Also, most if not all browsers will set their character encoding for form submissions to match the encoding sent from the web server. However, it is possible to override this (one common setting is UTF-8 which is a form of unicode). If you have your browser hard set to send a form submission on the localendar.com website using any encoding other than latin-1 or ASCII (plain text or ASCII is a subset of most encodings) then you will have problems.

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Marc Higgins
Support Associate, localendar.com
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