Apostrophes appearing as ?

[Mark H]

I have been sending an Access database file to a third party service to
upload to various websites including Amazon. Many of the the apostrophes in
text in the file are not translating correctly. I was guessing this might be
an ASCII character translations issue?? I am using Access 2003 (2000 file
format).

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Paul Shapiro]

I have been sending an Access database file to a third party service to
upload to various websites including Amazon. Many of the the apostrophes
in
text in the file are not translating correctly. I was guessing this might
be
an ASCII character translations issue?? I am using Access 2003 (2000 file
format).

It sounds like a character-encoding issue. Access stores strings in Unicode,
so it can represent many more characters than ASCII. When Unicode is
converted to ASCII, depending on how the conversion is done, unrepresentable
characters are substituted with something like a question mark. The "simple
apostrophe" character, from the keyboard, should be fine, but if some
automatic correction software replaced simple apostrophes with the fancy
ones that curve, those would not be ASCII characters.

It sounds like the issue is with your 3rd party service that is transferring
the data to the websites. Websites generally support Unicode character sets,
so it seems that it should be possible to get all the characters loaded
correctly.