Special Character Issue - Rails/DB2

Question

I have a Rails App and users are pasting certain values from MS Word.

When I pasted this... Paul’s “Test2”

This is what gets rendered in the app... Paul’s “Testâ€

However, and this is the most bizarre aspect of this - this does not happen at once and I have not been able to track the specific circustances that leads to it.

So a couple of questions:

• given that this is happening, any suggestion on how to handle the rendering of this junk (I would try a simple gsub but am actually finding it difficult to see what the characters actually are that I'm trying to replace.)
• anyone seen anything like this? We're running Rails 2.3 and DB2 9.7

Thanks

Answer 1

These are MS Word "smart quotes". See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/175785/how-do-i-convert-word-smart-quotes-and-em-dashes-in-a-string