Saving spreadsheets to HTML that have quotes in them.

In one of my hobby related tasks I get to create schedules for workers working rings at a dog trial. One of the annoyances I run into is when I have cells that have something like

20" - 24" walk through
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the quotes and the dashes end being morphed into wide characters when I save the spreadsheet as HTML. When those wide characters get sent to a browser they end up looking like garbage instead of the dashes and quotes that I started with.

Using the od -c command I found that there was an offending set of octals that showed up repeatedly everywhere that this offense occured. What follows is a one liner that removes them quite nicely.

 



perl -spi -e 's/\342\200\235/"/g' dvgsdc.jsp
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Comment on Saving spreadsheets to HTML that have quotes in them. Select or Download Code

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Re: Saving spreadsheets to HTML that have quotes in them. by jhourcle (Prior) on Sep 22, 2006 at 16:29 UTC
You'd be better off just declaring the correct character set for your page: `<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">` Otherwise, all other non-ascii characters are going to give you problems as well. (em dashes, en dashes, other 'smart' quotes, etc.)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Saving spreadsheets to HTML that have quotes in them. by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Sep 22, 2006 at 16:31 UTC
You'd be better off just declaring the correct character set for your page: Didn't really want to have to hand-edit something that shouldn't need editing in the first place. I'm not sure if I didn't try that at one point and have it not work. Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg	[reply]
Re^3: Saving spreadsheets to HTML that have quotes in them. by jhourcle (Prior) on Sep 22, 2006 at 17:36 UTC
Didn't really want to have to hand-edit something that shouldn't need editing in the first place. I'm not sure if I didn't try that at one point and have it not work. Who said anything about hand editing? `perl -pi -e 's#</head>#<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head>#' dvgsdc.jsp` You could also adjust the server to send the correct HTTP header, so it's not left to the browser to assume. If you're already sending a charset other than utf-8, then yes, it might take a little more effort, but odds are, it could be replaced just as easily with a script.	[reply] [d/l]