weird characters in blog posts

I have seen this several times in different articles - here is an example from Court's recent one:

If you watched coverage of the 2009 WSOP, you might have seen Ury on TV. He is very famous for a slow rolling Steven Friedlander. They were heads-up in a hand together on a 667 flop and Ury bet 1,000 chips into a 5,550 pot. Friedlander asked Ury if he just wanted to get it all-in, and putting his entire stack into the pot, he said, “Let’s get ‘em all-in.” Ury deliberately hesitated, holding his chips slightly above the table and pausing for a second before dropping them.

At that point Friedlander flipped his hand over and showed 67s for a flopped boat. Everyone was impressed by this hand except Ury. Ury said to him, “You’re in trouble.” The dealer told him to show and Ury said, “turn them over?” before finally flipping the cards over and showing 77. To say that the entire table was astonished is an understatement. Everyone erupted with excitement, and Friedlander sat there smiling good-naturedly after being slow rolled by a man twice his age.

I'm using firefox.

It's ongoing. Pretty sure it comes about as a result of the author drafting their post in Word or whatever and then copy pasting, which doesn't strip the wordprocessor's formatting and gets mistranslated. They need to first copy paste into Notepad to strip all the formatting and then copy paste again from there into the backend of FTR.

That's weird because on the actual blog post, it looks fine - Jack Ury Passes Away « Poker Blogs

But yeah, all messed up on http://www.flopturnriver.com/pokerfo...ay-185528.html

So I don't think it's a problem with proofreading, something with vBulletin. Passed it on.

Originally Posted by Warpe

They need to first copy paste into Notepad to strip all the formatting and then copy paste again from there into the backend of FTR.

this doesn't work, I do this with all my articles

I don't usually write blog posts on FTR and did not know this happens (didn't know that they were copied onto the forum). Carl, do you want me to go and edit the FTR blog entries I did last week, or are you looking into a fix?

Originally Posted by courtiebee

Originally Posted by Warpe

They need to first copy paste into Notepad to strip all the formatting and then copy paste again from there into the backend of FTR.

this doesn't work, I do this with all my articles

Looks like you may have missed this one darlin'. If you look at the post here: Jack Ury Passes Away « Poker Blogs you can see that the quotation marks, for example, are that weird slanty kind that Word does. If you ran it through something like Notepad first you'll get the more straight up and down kind which will appear correctly on web pages.

Originally Posted by Galapogos

Looks like you may have missed this one darlin'. If you look at the post here: Jack Ury Passes Away « Poker Blogs you can see that the quotation marks, for example, are that weird slanty kind that Word does. If you ran it through something like Notepad first you'll get the more straight up and down kind which will appear correctly on web pages.

If I wrote it in notepad instead of in Word, you are correct. If I write it in Word and then copy/paste it in notepad, it does not change anything. So nope, I didn't miss anything!

When I know that it is going to be a problem, I write it in notepad or I go back and change them manually. Didn't realize it was a problem with FTR posts until today.

Originally Posted by courtiebee

If I wrote it in notepad instead of in Word, you are correct. If I write it in Word and then copy/paste it in notepad, it does not change anything. So nope, I didn't miss anything!

When I know that it is going to be a problem, I write it in notepad or I go back and change them manually. Didn't realize it was a problem with FTR posts until today.

Wow you're right. Must be a Windows 7 "upgrade" to Notepad. I use XP at work and always use Notepad to properly clean up Word documents. Anyway, something else you can do is Save As... from Word and choose to save it as a TXT file, then when you click Save it will bring up a File Conversion window. Click the checkbox for Allow Character Substitution and that should clean up all the bad stuff. Then you'll be left with a very plain text file that doesn't have all that crazy nonsense.

Originally Posted by Galapogos

Wow you're right. Must be a Windows 7 "upgrade" to Notepad. I use XP at work and always use Notepad to properly clean up Word documents. Anyway, something else you can do is Save As... from Word and choose to save it as a TXT file, then when you click Save it will bring up a File Conversion window. Click the checkbox for Allow Character Substitution and that should clean up all the bad stuff. Then you'll be left with a very plain text file that doesn't have all that crazy nonsense.

That's good to know, I'll try it next time! Thanks Sean

Originally Posted by courtiebee

this doesn't work, I do this with all my articles

I don't usually write blog posts on FTR and did not know this happens (didn't know that they were copied onto the forum). Carl, do you want me to go and edit the FTR blog entries I did last week, or are you looking into a fix?

You can leave them for now and I'll see if there is a fix for all of them at once.

gmml , couldn't you use the swear word function to take the corrupted form and substitute in the correct form

Originally Posted by Keith_MM

gmml , couldn't you use the swear word function to take the corrupted form and substitute in the correct form

interesting solution, but from what i can see there isn't an easy way to create custom substitutions. for example, i can list a large number of words but they will all be replaced by the same thing.

the problem is the blogs and forum use different charsets and changing either one to match creates a lot of weird characters. still looking into this...

I've done a similar thing on a phpBB board i help admin on. looking on google

vBulletin Manual

“ goes to blank/null/space
’ goes to '
‘goes to '
”goes to blank/null/space

last one would have to go last thopugh othrwise it stops all the other censors working or can you use the blank ascii character stripping.