Weird characters - font problem?

[ignatios]

My annoying problem is that when people post quotes, there is usually a huge chunk of weird characters mixed in where the quotation marks should be.  Here's some examples:

A post from Ozgeorge:

It is a sad fact that internet presence is assumed to be a sign of reality. A nice webpage with a logo and a link in Wiki and suddenly it is "credible". Thew internet can present many misleading "signs and wonders": “Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There!’ do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. See, I have told you beforehand." (Matthew 24:23-25)

Here's another one:

« Last Edit: August 20, 2006, 07:53:46 AM by ΑριστÎÂà »

Is this a problem with a font missing or what?  Like I said, it often occurs where there are supposed to be quotation marks.  Thanks.

[Nigula Qian Zishi]

I have the same issue.

[wynd]

It seems to happen with things that were posted years ago. I don't see any recent posts with that problem.

[Anastasios]

There was an encoding issue several years ago when we had to do a rush database conversion to another site, unfortunately all the encoding was messed up (if anyone wants to know what happened in detail I suppose I could try to explain it).  At any rate, the old posts are toast and we will have to manually fix them some day--I thought about it before but with probably 5-10 k posts affected, it is quite tedious. If anyone wants to help me though let me know.

Is this happening for current quotes now?

Thanks

Fr Anastasios

[wynd]

There was an encoding issue several years ago when we had to do a rush database conversion to another site, unfortunately all the encoding was messed up (if anyone wants to know what happened in detail I suppose I could try to explain it).  At any rate, the old posts are toast and we will have to manually fix them some day--I thought about it before but with probably 5-10 k posts affected, it is quite tedious. If anyone wants to help me though let me know.

Is there a way you can just do a massive search and replace operation on the whole database? From what I've seen, the strings of characters aren't random. For example, ‘ is “ (opening double quote) and ’ is ” (closing double quote). It might be possible to get most of the common ones quickly.

Is this happening for current quotes now?

If you quote an old post then yes. If you write a new post then no.

[Anastasios]

For some of the, search and replace would work; however, the database is over 300 megs now and most programs crash when you try to do it.  I have one that works, but on some of the smaller errors, the outputted error can actually match some code strings....not a pretty sight

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