Re: Bad character data

no problem noah,

been there inheriting bad data, suXX0r. wish i could be of more help.
if all else fails look at the translate() function to replace the
offending chars... dunno what i can do, but which type of client are
you currently using?

--
doug

On May 3, 2004, at 4:55 PM, Noah Davis wrote:

> 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.
>>
>>
>> ---------------------------(end of
>> broadcast)---------------------------
>> TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command
>> (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to
>> majordomo(at)postgresql(dot)org)
>>
>
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of
> broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
>