Re: Bad character data

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.
>
>
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