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Translate Word Smart Quotes submitted in form data?

In the event that someone copies and pastes the contents of a Word document into a web form, I would like to translate the special Word characters to their ASCII equivalent. I found the following statement online...

$form_fields->{comments} =~ tr/\x91\x92\x93\x94\x96\x97/''""\-\-/;

But I cannot get this to work correctly. For example; when a word that contains a single quote is entered into the form I get the following as a result from the previous statement: client?'s It translates the character correctly to the ASCII single quote but I'm not sure where the question mark is coming from.

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Adam314

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SOLUTION

ahoffmann

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unobserved

I would suggest that first you use HTML::Entities to convert all high-bit ascii charatacters to HTML codes.

####################################
use HTML::Entities;
my $clean_input = encode_entities( $input );
####################################

This will convert the MSWord Smart quotes to “ (Left Double Quote) and ” (Right Double Quote) respectively. They will now display properly in a browser.

If your goal was to remove them completely and replace them with regular quotes you could then:
#############################
$clean_input =~ s|“|"|gi;
$clean_input =~ s|”|"|gi;
#############################

unobserved

Also, if you're only worried about quote characters, you also might want to consider ‘ (Left Single) and ’ (Right Single). But the list of entities that will get converted coming out of MSWord goes far beyond just those four. HTML::Entities really is a god send in this case.

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unobserved

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