Re: Bad character data

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:luckycat(at)comcast(dot)net]
Sent: Monday, May 03, 2004 4:38 PM
To: Noah Davis
Cc: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
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.
>
>
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