This doesn't appear to be a Cake issue. I suspect what you're seeing is the dreaded "paste from Word" conundrum. Yes, you're talking about Excel here but it's all the same problem: bizarre and convoluted formatting and other metadata coming along for the ride.
Also, you should first ensure that you don't have a character set mismatch somewhere. This page has some good information, including a couple of ways you can test things (and some Java stuff that's irrelevant): https://blogs.oracle.com/shankar/entry/how_to_handle_utf_8 You should also test in various browsers to see if the same character shows up. In Firefox, if you have Firebug installed (if you don't you're missing out on a lot) paste into the textarea, then right-click on it and choose "Inspect with Firebug" to see what content is there. On Tue, Apr 17, 2012 at 12:45 PM, jcrens8392 <runner1...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have a form that allows people to copy & paste from Excel into a textarea. > The textarea is then parsed and the data is saved one line at a time. > > I've noticed a weird issue that I can't seem to resolve to the point I'm > confident in it's reliability. > > When pasting data from excel, where there is an empty cell with a space in > it, cake appears to be converting that empty cell to the ASCII character 182 > ('A' with circumflex accent) followed by one character of whitespace. > > The problem is, I don't believe the conversion is happening exactly as I've > described. That's what I see when I print the data, however, any attempts to > use preg_replace or str_replace to strip that character(s) have failed. > > The only solution I've been able to find so far is to convert the import > data to html entities, which converts the offending characters to > "Â " and then strip out those using str_replace. However, I'm not > too confident this won't corrupt other, valid import data that I haven't yet > considered. > > I have not been able to reproduce this problem outside of Cake on the same > machine. Even with character encoding on the page and accept-encoding attr > on the form matching Cake's. > > Here's how to reproduce the problem: > > * Create textarea using cake form helper (nothing non-standard). > * Create excel spreadsheet with 1 empty cell > * In that empty cell, add a space > * Copy that empty cell and paste into the textarea > * Use debug($this->request->data['ModelName']['fieldName']) to print out the > submitted data. > * You should see a ASCII character 182 followed by a space > * Try and strip that character <-- I haven't been able to do this at all > without converting using htmlentities > > -John > > -- > Our newest site for the community: CakePHP Video Tutorials > http://tv.cakephp.org > Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://ask.cakephp.org and help > others with their CakePHP related questions. > > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > cake-php+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php -- Our newest site for the community: CakePHP Video Tutorials http://tv.cakephp.org Check out the new CakePHP Questions site http://ask.cakephp.org and help others with their CakePHP related questions. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to cake-php+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php
