A real puzzler on text with SS Publish

[mjbrunelle]

For some reason, commas are now not being generated correctly when we publish a page.

Example before: For use on masonry, concrete, stone, cast iron and other ferrous metals.

Published correctly, now we get:

For use on masonry‚ concrete‚ stone‚ cast iron and other ferrous metals.

The Encode HTML output: Is Unchecked. We turned the HTML editor off and the problem persists.

Also:

If we change the commas to escape sequence ‚ they publish correctly. However SS changes them from the escape sequence to a comma in the page definition. If we then edit any feature of the page and re-publish, the commas are not output correctly. So every time we edit a page we have to edit every comma in the text on the page back to an escape sequence.

Any suggestions?

MarkB

[Jim]

That is probably because you copied text from something like a Word document that uses the fancy quote marks. It could also be that you have changed the character encoding set that your browser is using to something other than ISO-8859.

[mjbrunelle]

Not the issue Jim,

We either hand type directly into the SS text field, use the provided SS HTML Editor, any cut and paste would be done from Notepad, or Visual-Studio Web Developer 2010. 99% of site is uploaded from an Visual Basic produced spreadsheet, both Product and Page all special characters are set as escaped sequences (‚) due to issues created during the SS database upload process.

Character set definiton in our master template, so we do not get different charset in pages.

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />

MarkB

[Jim]

There are Microsoft specific codes that are not part of the html entity characters defined for use with html. Both Notepad and Visual basic are Microsoft applications and would accept (and generate) those characters but that does not make them part of the HTML specification. You can find a list of the valid html entity codes at http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp . If you look at the page you will see that &#130; does not fall into the valid ISO-8859-1 character set which inlcude characters up to 128 and from 160 to 255. The characters from 129 to 159 are not included in the ISO-8859-1 character set but are part of the Windows 1252 specification.

I have seen cases where the webserver does not output characters as expected in some situations because the character does not match the characterset that the webserver is configured to use. Microsoft characters fall into that group, particularly if the webserver is a non-Windows machine.

If you need to use those characters in your code perhaps you could try using the name value instead of the hex code for the character.
I have seen a number of websites listing the codes here is a copy and paste from one site
Quotation mark " &quot; &#34; &#x22;
Ampersand & &amp; &#38; &#x26;
Less-than sign < &lt; &#60; &#x3C;
Greater-than sign > &gt; &#62; &#x3E;
Open single quote ‘ &lsquo; &#8216; &#x2018;
Close single quote ’ &rsquo; &#8217; &#x2019;
Open double quotes “ &ldquo; &#8220; &#x201C;
Close double quotes ” &rdquo; &#8221; &#x201D;
Single low-9 quote ‚ &sbquo; &#8218; &#x201A;
Double low-9 quote „ &bdquo; &#8222; &#x201E;
Prime/minutes/feet ′ &prime; &#8242; &#x2032;
Double prime/seconds/inches ″ &Prime; &#8243; &#x2033;
Non-breaking space &nbsp; &#160; &#xA0;
Hyphen ‐ — &#8208; &#x2010;
En dash – &ndash; &#8211; &#x2013;
Em dash — &mdash; &#8212; &#x2014;
En space   &ensp; &#8194; &#x2002;
Em space   &emsp; &#8195; &#x2003;
Thin space   &thinsp; &#8201; &#x2009;
Broken vertical bar ¦ &brvbar; &#166; &#xA6;
Bullet • &bull; &#8226; &#x2022;
Triangular bullet ‣ — &#8227; &#x2023;
Horizontal ellipsis … &hellip; &#8230; &#x2026;
Circumflex ˆ &circ; &#710; &#x2C6;
Umlaut or dieresis ¨ &uml; &#168; &#xA8;
Small tilde ˜ &tilde; &#732; &#x2DC;
Single left angle quote ‹ &lsaquo; &#8249; &#x2039;
Single right angle quote › &rsaquo; &#8250; &#x203A;
Left angle quote; guillemotleft « &laquo; &#171; &#xAB;
Right angle quote; guillemotright » &raquo; &#187; &#xBB;
Overline ‾ &oline; &#8254; &#x203E;
Inverted question mark ¿ &iquest; &#191; &#xBF;
Inverted exclamation ¡ &iexcl; &#161; &#xA1;
Interrobang ‽ — &#8253; &#x203D;

[mjbrunelle]

Thanks Jim,

But this does not explain that when the escape sequence is converted by SS to a , in our text fields when we save the page. The next time we edit and publish we get corrupted characters.