Special characters in Flex

Question

I am working on a Flex app that has a MySQL database. Data is retrieved from the DB using PHP then I am using AMFPHP to pass the data on to Flex

The problem that I am having is that the data is being copied from Word documents which sometimes result in some of the more unusual characters are not displaying properly. For example, Word uses different characters for starting and ending double quotes instead of just " (the standard double quotes). Another example is the long dash instead of -.

All of these characters result in one or more accented capital A characters appearing instead. Not only that, each time the document is saved, the characters are replaced again resulting in an ever-increasing number of these accented A's appearing.

Doing a search and replace for each troublesome character to swap it for one of the none characters seems to work but obviously this requires compiling a list of all the characters that may appear and means there is scope for this continuing as new characters are used for the first time. It also seems like a bit of a brute force way of getting round the problem rather than a proper solution.

Does anyone know what causes this and have any good workarounds / fixes? I have had similar problems when using utf-8 characters in html documents that aren't set to use utf-8. Is this the same thing and if so, how do I get flex to use utf-8?

Many thanks

Adam

Answer 1

It is the same thing, and smart quotes aren't special as such: you will in fact be failing for every non-ASCII character. As such a trivial ad-hoc replace for the smart quote characters will be pointless.

At some point, someone is mis-decoding a sequence of bytes as ISO-8859-1 or Windows code page 1252 when it should have been UTF-8. Difficult to say where without detail/code.

What is “the document”? What format is it? Does that format support UTF-8 content? If it does not, you will need to encode output you put into it at the document-creation phase to the encoding the consumer of that document expects, eg. using iconv.