The content for the website is generated by the staff and put into the site using the content management system. Much of this content is created in a Word Processing program such as Microsoft Word. In many cases, the content is not formatted correctly for the web. While the cms does a good job of filtering out the Word Document markup, there are still some charaters that get through the filter, but don’t display properly on the web. These characters show up as odd symbols such as diamonds and squares. I have created a filter to run the content through before it is displayed, finding the invalid characters and replacing them with html character codes.
Due to the restraints of the system I am working in, I decided to go with a vbscript dictionary object to hold an array of characters that were not displaying properly in the browser. I created an api that could be included into any page, and used an algorithm to detect and replace the pesky invalid characters.
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‘ function to replace extended asci chars with the html equivalent ‘***************************
Function replace_characters(inString)
newstring = inString
dim lamechars
Set lamechars = CreateObject _
(“Scripting.Dictionary”)
lamechars.Add “–”, “–”
lamechars.Add “®”, “®”
lamechars.Add “’”, “’”
lamechars.Add ““”, ““”
lamechars.Add “””, “””
lamechars.Add “—”, “–”
For Each character in lamechars
newstring=Replace(newstring, character, lamechars(character))
Next
Response.Write(newstring)
End Function
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‘ end function to replace extended asci chars with the html equivalent ‘—————————