Hi Doug, Thanks for the response. I do realize it's not the ideal situation, but it's the database I inherited, so not much I can do there :) . I tried the to_ascii and it doesn't seem to help much. It may be that I can try a different client and get more legible characters. Not sure.
-----Original Message----- From: douglas morrison [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 4:38 PM To: Noah Davis Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [ADMIN] 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. > > > ---------------------------(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
