Re: copyright symbol

From	Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.javascript
Subject	Re: copyright symbol
Date	2014-06-04 11:21 +0000
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<lmmvf6$dvf$2@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References	<V_adnebgvuRUPxPOnZ2dnUVZ_vudnZ2d@westnet.com.au>

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On Wed, 04 Jun 2014 14:36:26 +1000, Andrew Poulos wrote:

> I have an MS SQL Server database with a copyright symbol in a field of
> data type varchar(80). When this is read by JScript in a classic ASP and
> then displayed in the page the symbol displays as a black diamond with a
> question mark in it.
> 
> If I change the page's charset from
>    <meta charset="UTF-8">
> to
>    <meta charset="iso-8859-1">
> the symbol correctly displays as a copyright symbol.

I'm guessing that the data stored in the sql database isn't a utf-8 
copyright symbol, but rather an iso 8859-1 copyright symbol. I'm also 
guessing that an iso-8859-1 copyright symbol is an illegal character in 
utf-8.

> Why does changing the charset "fix" the display of the symbol?

Because it makes the browser display the symbol in the correct character 
set.

> I'd rather keep the charset as UTF but I'm at a loss as to what's going
> on.

My guess would be that someone is filling in a form using windows and 
you're receiving iso-8859-1 character data. This is then being put into a 
database. Later it's being read from the database and placed in a 
document as utf-8.

> Do I need to encode the symbol before it goes into the database?

This would need you to detect the character encoding of the input and 
convert it to utf-8 (or html entities). This is probably the safest 
method, as hopefully the data source provides some information as to the 
encoding the data is generated with. Failing that, you can try and sniff 
the incoming data to guess at the encoding. User agent strings may give 
possibly useful hints.

If all the character data is between values 32 and 127 inclusive (' ' .. 
'~') you can probably treat it as utf-8. Otherwise you need to determine 
the encoding. This is probably something you need to do in the server 
when processing the input (presumably form) data. This question probably 
be,longs in a perl / php / python / cgi of some description newsgroup.

> Do I need to unescape/decode the value from the database?

This is also a possible solution. However, you may have lost track of 
what the original character encoding was at this point.

-- 
Denis McMahon, denismfmcmahon@gmail.com

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copyright symbol Andrew Poulos <ap_prog@hotmail.com> - 2014-06-04 14:36 +1000
  Re: copyright symbol "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2014-06-04 08:51 +0300
    Re: copyright symbol "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2014-06-04 10:37 +0200
  Re: copyright symbol Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2014-06-04 11:06 +0200
    Re: copyright symbol Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2014-06-04 14:34 +0200
      Re: copyright symbol "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2014-06-04 15:41 +0300
    Re: copyright symbol Andrew Poulos <ap_prog@hotmail.com> - 2014-06-05 10:28 +1000
      Re: copyright symbol "Evertjan." <exxjxw.hannivoort@inter.nl.net> - 2014-06-05 09:12 +0200
  Re: copyright symbol Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> - 2014-06-04 11:21 +0000

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