Have you tried using Word manually to create a doc file with the desired characters in it? If you do that and inspect the contents of the doc file, you'll probably learn what you need to know. I'm no expert on this, but I have had occasion to inspect hex dumps of Word doc files that contained non-ASCII character data. It's very strange.

If you are mixing "smart quotes" and "wingdings", you may actually end up with UTF-16LE encoding of unicode in the doc file. Maybe the OLE module stuff will handle the gory details for you so you don't need to worry about it too much, and all you might need to do is provide the Unicode code-points for the characters you want (that is, specify them with hex notation, e.g.: "\x{201C}...\x{201D}" for a string surrounded by single-quotes).

I'm just guessing at that, but if nothing else has worked yet, it's worth a try. In case it helps, there's a handy little tool here that I copied from a posting on the perl-unicode mail list, to search for various characters in the unicode table.

In reply to Re: Replacing none alpha/numeric characters in a Word document by graff
in thread Replacing none alpha/numeric characters in a Word document by merrymonk

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