cut and pasting from word

[vasah20]

hey all -
i've got a small problem with people cut and pasting from Word documents into a textarea. I can already detect all the carriage returns, but I'm getting a problem with those bullet points and various " marks. They are being stored in my db as 0 with a line through it, or variations on that, while some of the " and ' are being stored as ASCII codes. Unfortunately, I'm taking this data and generating an RTF file from it, so the ASCII codes show up.

I was thinking about regexp-ing the input, but how can I know any/all of the possible combinations for bullets, or ASCII code, etc?

this seems like it would be a fairly common problem, so I was hoping that someone else has encountered this and defeated it.

TIA -

leo

------------
Leo Mendoza
lmendoza@garbersoft.net

 

[derren]

Hi

You don't have to know all the codes of every bullet and o thorn (the name of that slash "o" character). The ASCII values for each character go from 1 to 255 but start from about 9 for a Tab, 10 is a carriage return, 13 is a line feed etc. So in theory you could loop though all the ascii values except the common ones such as 32 (space) and replace them with whatever character you wish. I would suggest you do this whilst creating your rtf file though as it could be quite intensive.

You can get full listings of ascii character values from loads of places on the web.

Derren
[The only person in the world to like Word]