Pasting text from Word into Apex Textarea

Question

Hi Folks,
I have a client that wanted to transform their Word forms (something like customer survey) into Apex screens.. every thing went great but they noticed that when they try to copy text from the Word forms into Apex textareas some characters will show as an up-side-down question mark. Some characters are the apostrophe , consecutive dots (...) and so on. I don't know what is the best way to handle that, I am thinking about writing a function that escapes those characters for a passed text and add up decoding to it every time users encounter a news bad character..but maybe somebody has a better idea...
Thanks,
Sam

Answer 1

We had the same problem. If you can't update the character set, which is usually a big deal, then you can always use javascript to change the textfield or text area before the user clicks save. We have onchange events on all of our items to catch when an item saves and sets a flag to do an autosave when the click somewhere else in the application. You could use a similar function to translate the characters on the browser before they hit the database.
If you're going to be searching on this data, you probably don't want to store the special characters anyway. They will have to type in the characters to search and some of the MS characters can be misleading and cause them to not find what they're looking for.
The array configured_values is a string array where the first index is the bad character and the second index is the value to replace it with
function madeChange(e)
{ document.getElementById('P0_MADE_CHANGE').value='TRUE';
     if(e)
          var string = e.value;
       //If it is a text-area or a text-field
       if(isNaN(string))
       {  var aux;
          for(i=0; i<(configured_values.length)-2;i=i+2)
          aux= eval('/' + String.fromCharCode(configured_values) + '/' + 'g');
string=string.replace(aux,configured_values[i+1]);
     e.value=string;
Edited by: YodaHart on Jul 21, 2010 10:18 PM