solve copy/paste encoding problems?

Question

I hear that you can copy paste text from MS word and send an email or post something and there will be an encoding problem.

I also heard from someone else its only a problem with webpages that cant handle unicode. Is it possible to have a doc that cannot be copy/paste to a webbrowsers/apps properly? (assuming its all text and only has alignment problems). What can i have in a document that triggers some problems easily fixable by adding more code (such as unicode support).

sidenote my webapps are written in C# asp.net

Answer 1

It is very much possible.

When you copy/paste from Word, you can end up in all kinds of ugly situations. Paste it into a rich text editor, and you'll probably end up having some crazy html hidden away, not seen until you view the result. We have been wrestling with this problem a long time at work, and the easiest solution to get right encoding and no extra:

1. Copy your text
2. Paste it into notepad/notepad++
3. Copy the text from there
4. Paste it!

Hope that helps!