Re: [ADMIN] Bad character data

[douglas morrison]

The lack of responses is prolly because this sort of thing is usually 
handled by the client... The client for input should be 
stripping/converting to ASCII/unicode whichever chars are unwanted and 
notifying the user if anything is removed/unusable. The client for 
display should then be able to parse the chars correctly...

You might be able to use your current data if you change your SELECT to 
something like:

SELECT to_ascii(columnName, 'LATIN1') AS convertedColumn
        FROM tableName;
hth,
doug

On May 3, 2004, at 3:23 PM, Noah Davis wrote:
I posted this to the pgsql general list, but alas, I did not get any
responses. Perhaps someone here could be of assistance?
I have a database with some bad characters in it -- some users had 
entered
MS Word smart quotes, em dashes, foreign characters, and they look like
gibberish coming out of the database. Most important are the smart 
quotes I
guess.

What's the best way to replace these characters? I thought I might be 
able
to run a simple SQL UPDATE command, but some of the gibberish for 
different
characters looks the same (at least from my client it does), and it 
would
clobber them all.

I have a feeling there's some sort of ASCII code or unicode solution 
to this
problem, but I could use am little push in the right direction.

Thanks.
Noah.
---------------------------(end of 
broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command
    (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to 
[EMAIL PROTECTED])


---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend