SEO

I have an MySQL database called zingers. The structure is:

zid - integer, key, autoincrement
keyword - varchar
citation - text
quotation - text

I am having trouble storing text, as typed in latter two fields.
Special characters and punctuation all seem not to be stored and
retrieved correctly.

Special apostrophes and single quotes from Microsoft Word are causing a
special problem, even though I have ''ed all 's

perhaps the encoding of the database itself should be different? it is
currenlty latin_swedish_ci

Input and output is through a browser.

I think my problem may be that I need to encode the string before
saving it in the databse. Can anyone point me in the right direction
here?



here's the error message:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position
95: ordinal not in range(128)
args = ('ascii', "update zingers set keywords =
'a;Action;b;Religi... \n \n \n ' where zid = 422", 95, 96, 'ordinal not
in range(128)')
encoding = 'ascii'
end = 96
object = "update zingers set keywords = 'a;Action;b;Religi... \n
\n \n ' where zid = 422"
reason = 'ordinal not in range(128)'
start = 95



the characters I am trying to add are startquote and endquote copied
and pasted from Microsoft Word.



Can anyone help me on this?

bests,

-rsr-

On 1 Jan 2007 21:56:51 -0800, Ron wrote:
> I have an MySQL database called zingers. The structure is:
>
> zid - integer, key, autoincrement
> keyword - varchar
> citation - text
> quotation - text
>
> I am having trouble storing text, as typed in latter two fields.
> Special characters and punctuation all seem not to be stored and
> retrieved correctly.
>
> Special apostrophes and single quotes from Microsoft Word are causing a
> special problem, even though I have ''ed all 's

Right problem, but wrong solution. The "special apostrophes" from Word
aren't the same as "'" either.

> perhaps the encoding of the database itself should be different? it is
> currenlty latin_swedish_ci

That's a collation, not an encoding, nor a character set. It's also
missing the '1' after 'latin'. (It's also not your actual problem, so
I'm not going to go further into those.)

> Input and output is through a browser.
>
> I think my problem may be that I need to encode the string before
> saving it in the databse. Can anyone point me in the right direction
> here?

You need to *either* strip those special apostrophies out and make them
normal puctuation, or ALTER the column's character set to one that does
have those "special apostrophies" in it. You'll find them at U+2018,
U+2019 and U+201C, U+201D. Which means you'll probably want to use utf8
as your character set.

> here's the error message:
>
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position
> 95: ordinal not in range(128)

This should be yout first clue. ascii's pretty limited: it's only got
128 characters, and anything with an accent or diacritical of any kind
won't fit into the definition.

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