em-dash rendering problem

June 18, 2003 4:50 AM

My em-dashes in old posts are being rendered as "?" characters. New posts seem OK.
posted by nicwolff to bugs at 4:50 AM (4 comments total)

I think it's the change to ColdFusion MX. The old ones are probably stored in the database as hard-coded em dashes and CF isn't recognizing the high ASCII charater. Or something. New ones are most likely stores as ampersand+151.
posted by yerfatma at 9:36 AM on June 18, 2003

Isn't that exactly backwards to how it should work?
posted by kirkaracha at 11:16 AM on June 18, 2003

I think it's an ampersand issue. Someone posts a comment with — that gets stored in the db as the high-ascii character, instead of —

Ideally, I should be escaping ampersands properly but never bothered to write the function that escaped them unless someone was using them properly (basically in english the code would say "replace all & with &, unless there's some stuff to the right of it").

I think that'd do it.
posted by mathowie at 11:31 AM on June 18, 2003

*wonders if matthowie will go stand in the corner for his timeout*
posted by billsaysthis at 11:47 AM on June 18, 2003