Macro Symbols

[Jorge]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to copy some text from a Microsoft Word 2003 document to a MySQL
5.0 database. I have a problem when the document contains symbols (inserted
via the Insert -> Symbol), such as the following: ŔŕŶŷΑǻǼ¹¶µ®mÇλŀĀ
When I print them in the debugging console, I get '?' characters for many of
them.

Can anyone help me?

Jorge

 

[larrysulky]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to copy some text from a Microsoft Word 2003 document to a MySQL
5.0 database. I have a problem when the document contains symbols (inserted
via the Insert -> Symbol), such as the following: ŔŕŶŷΑǻǼ¹¶µ®mÇλŀĀ
When I print them in the debugging console, I get '?' characters for manyof
them.

Can anyone help me?

Jorge

Jorge, I don't know how well MySQL 5.0 supports special characters.
You may have to build in a pre-process that converts the characters to
XML character entities; for example, Ç => Ă or Ă .
--larry

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Jorge,

The VBA editor (and debugging window) can't deal with Unicode, so it's
"normal" to see "?" there.
I don't know about MySQL... You could check with Hex(AscW(myString)) whether
the code is still the same as in Word.

Also check if you're using the same font as in Word. Arial and Times New
Roman have a lot more characters (most of your examples except ¹¶µ®
included) that are usually missing in other fonts.

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Jorge]

Thanks a lot for your answers,
Then I guess that the best solution would be to replace the symbols by the
Unicode code using the AscW function. I have stored them like this in the
database and they are correctly displayed in the browser.
The problem is that my documents are quite large. I guess there is no other
solution than checking character by character for symbols and changing them
when necessary, right?

Regards,

Jorge

 

[Klaus Linke]

Hi Jorge,

If the vesion of mySQL that you use supports Unicode (...from googling, it
seems that 4.1 does), you shouldn't need to do anything with those symbols.

Your original post had a pretty weird assortment of symbols (quite a few
from Latin Extended A, Latin Extended B, Greek).
Checking character by character is terribly slow. If you need to replace
them with something, it would be faster to use Find/Replace, especially if
the docs are large.

You can use a wildcard search to look for characters in a certain code range
by searching for [x-y], where you can copy any Unicode character into the
Find dialog for x and y.
Or you can type the hex code, and use Alt+X (in the English version,
ToggleCharacterCode) to toggle the code into the character.
Say a search for [A-?] (Unicode U+0100 - U+03F3) should find all characters
in the code blocks mentioned above.
Once you have found such a character that needs to be converted with the
wildcard search, you can determine the code (AscW) and replace it in the
whole doc... Rinse and repeat until no more problematic characters are
found.

Characters from Latin-1 (¹¶µ®...) should not be a problem, they are probably
covered by the character set in mySQL anyway.

Regards,
Klaus

 

[Klaus Linke]

Say a search for [A-?] (Unicode U+0100 - U+03F3)

Say a search for [Ā-ϳ] ...
(forgot how to send Unicode: Mime, Quoted Printable)

Klaus