Getting 'Smart Quotes' out of Access

Every week I export a txt file of a table out of Access to a third party
provider who converts it to an XML file for wide distribution and then upload
to various websites such as Amazon. I am having problems with lots of
characters being converted improperly, most significantly the apostrophes and
quotation marks. Is there a way I can 'clean' these out of my database (use a
different font such as Arial Unicode in the table?) or when I export the txt
file?

Use Courier New. It's a monofont which doesn't even have formatted
characters. It should be the font automatically used by Notepad.
--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.accessmvp.com
http://www.mvps.org/access


"Mark H" wrote in message
...
Every week I export a txt file of a table out of Access to a third party
provider who converts it to an XML file for wide distribution and then
upload
to various websites such as Amazon. I am having problems with lots of
characters being converted improperly, most significantly the apostrophes
and
quotation marks. Is there a way I can 'clean' these out of my database
(use a
different font such as Arial Unicode in the table?) or when I export the
txt
file?

"Arvin Meyer [MVP]" wrote in
:

Use Courier New. It's a monofont which doesn't even have formatted
characters. It should be the font automatically used by Notepad.

I don't understand your instructions here.

Courier New has "smart quotes" in the font.

Secondly, Notepad does not use Courier New. I think it's using
Lucida Console, but I'm not sure on that. Whichever font it is, it
includes "curly quotes".

Even if the font doesn't include the curly quotes, changing the font
doesn't do anything to change the character encoding -- it will only
cause the offending characters to be replaced with a square block.

Choosing a font affects only display, not the actual encoding, which
has to be handled properly during the export and import process.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

Run an update query on the table before you run the export.

You can put both actions into a macro, and run the
macro to do the export. You can add a button to your
ribbon to run the macro to do the export.

Or, if you are using forms, you can add a button to a
form to run both actions.

(david)

"Mark H" wrote in message
...
Every week I export a txt file of a table out of Access to a third party
provider who converts it to an XML file for wide distribution and then
upload
to various websites such as Amazon. I am having problems with lots of
characters being converted improperly, most significantly the apostrophes
and
quotation marks. Is there a way I can 'clean' these out of my database
(use a
different font such as Arial Unicode in the table?) or when I export the
txt
file?

"Excuse me, but my Notepad is using Courier New, and it doesn't have curly quotes" I think I set that up to match the font I use in the IDE code window.

--
Arvin Meyer, MCP, MVP
http://www.datastrat.com
http://www.accessmvp.com
http://www.mvps.org/access
"David W. Fenton" wrote in message 36.97...
"Arvin Meyer [MVP]" wrote in
:

Use Courier New. It's a monofont which doesn't even have formatted
characters. It should be the font automatically used by Notepad.

I don't understand your instructions here.

Courier New has "smart quotes" in the font.

Secondly, Notepad does not use Courier New. I think it's using
Lucida Console, but I'm not sure on that. Whichever font it is, it
includes "curly quotes".

Even if the font doesn't include the curly quotes, changing the font
doesn't do anything to change the character encoding -- it will only
cause the offending characters to be replaced with a square block.

Choosing a font affects only display, not the actual encoding, which
has to be handled properly during the export and import process.

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/

Arvin Meyer [MVP] wrote:

"Excuse me, but my Notepad is using Courier New, and it doesn't have curly
quotes" I think I set that up to match the font I use in the IDE code
window.

Smart quotes are only "curly" in some fonts. In others they are just
slanted. Regardless of how a particular font displays them they are
different characters from ' and " and in many situations outside of Office
apps they will not render properly.

"Arvin Meyer [MVP]" wrote in
:

"Excuse me, but my Notepad is using Courier New, and it doesn't
have curly quotes" I think I set that up to match the font I use
in the IDE code window.

May well be, but that's not the default.

I just Googled how to change the font, and it's quite easy -- just
go to the Format menu and choose Font, etc.

It never occurred to me that:

1. a text editor would allow you to change the font (other than just
changing the display font).

2. changing it in one instance of the text editor is a permanent
change.

I don't know what version of Courier New you're using that lacks
curly quotes. I notice that "Courier" lacks curly quotes, but
Courier NEW has them.

But as I said, switching the font doesn't cause the curly quotes to
become straight quotes *unless* the font you're using has mapped
ANSI 0147 and 0148 to use the same idiograph as 0034. On my WinXP
PC, the Courier font displays a black box, indicating no idiograph
has been assigned to the positions allocated for curly quotes.

( just checked on a relatively pristine Win7 installation, and
Notepad defaults to Lucida Console. I definitely have never changed
it on that machine, nor can I imagine that I once knew that I could
change it in the past and then forgot!)

--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/