RE: Converting &, >, <, ", and other odd-ball characte

Hey Mike,

Actually, what I would like to figure out is how to only allow ascii
characters that are NOT used in other programs for special things. We allow
people to copy/paste MS WORD document text into our site. Alot of people
don't know that bullets, " " and so on do NOT show up in HTML. Therefore, we
sometimes get strange problems (such as pages not showing up right, or faxes
going out with escaped characters instead of the actual character) when a
client does this. I would like for a way to either convert those few
characters that do this, or remove them all together from a string being
submitted.

Thanks.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Brown [mailto:mike@xxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Friday, February 16, 2001 7:50 AM
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re:  Converting &, >, <, ", and other odd-ball
> characters...
> 
> 
> Kevin Duffey wrote:
> > Interesting dilema. For the most part, we are a b2b site 
> that deals with
> > specific clients. Very unlikely this will occur, as far as 
> the non-ascii
> > characters. I guess you could just "omit" them? I am not 
> sure how it would
> > be handled. How do you make a web-based solution work with 
> these characters?
> 
> This isn't really the forum for this, so I'll just point you 
> to 2 articles
> I wrote recently:
> 
> http://skew.org/xml/misc/URI-i18n/
> http://skew.org/xml/misc/xml_vs_http/
> 
> The answer is, basically, you don't make it work. I've seen 
> message board
> forms that collect language info (user-entered, or obtained from HTTP
> Accept-Language headers) and make an educated guess about the encoding
> based on that, but it's always just a guess. IE4/5 is fairly 
> predictable
> and even makes the actual encoding available, if scripting is 
> turned on,
> so if you're targeting those browsers, you have more control. As for
> omitting non-ASCII characters, sure, you could do that. *cringe* :)
> 
>    - Mike
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Mike J. Brown, software engineer at            My XML/XSL resources: 
> webb.net in Denver, Colorado, USA              http://skew.org/xml/
> 
> 
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