Bad 's and "s etc in production description

[racerx8413]

I was able to succesfully import 9400 products into my Zen database, however I have run into one small issue. It's an annoyance more than anything, but for many many products, the quotes and single quotes are being replaced by ”, little little white squares, etc. Prior to insertion, I removed all of the special characters that would give the tables problems, like the TM marks, etc. I didnt figure apostrophe's and quotation marks would be an issue.

Anywhoo... after searching, I found a post in the archives, a hint at a script that would removed bad characters and replace them with good characters. However the link in the article was bad, and I am unfortunately not at the level to understand what the script was doing.

For example.
I know that everywhere I see †its a " (however in some places, "'s show up fine)
’ is a '

Is there some sort of script I can run, or an SQL command that will run through the product description table and find/replace these characters?

[kobra]

Is there some sort of script I can run, or an SQL command that will run through the product description table and find/replace these characters?

You can use phpmysql to grab just this table and open it in a plain text editor and search and replace for †and ’

Replace †with & # 34;
Replace ’ with & # 39;

Spaces added to prevent parsing

[racerx8413]

I would like to further expand upon how much i do NOT know about php and mySQL.


What is phpmysql.

The tools at my disposal are .. phpmyadmin, and I do not know a lick of sql.

If I am understanding correctly, I need to export just this table, add a "drop table" when doing the export, edit it with a text editor, then re-import the table? Is there anything I'm missing here, or have I completely lost the point.

[kobra]

My BAD I meant phpmyadmin and as long as you can get a backup of this table and use something like notepad to search and replace you do not expressley have to know mysql

[racerx8413]

Cool Cool, I'm going through it with wordpad at the moment, (notepad crashes, the file is 4 megs) Thanks for all your help!

[kobra]

wordpad is questionable???

Get this http://notepad2.com/

4Megs???

Did you just get the product_description table?

[racerx8413]

Yep, almost 10,000 product descriptions.