Smart Quotes

Historically, students send their resumes to the jschool. Assistants key them into Quark for a publication called the “facebook.” Then other assistants copy resumes out of Quark and into Dreamweaver, format them manually, and post to the web. Time and energy wasted in every direction. I’ve been building a web-based database that lets students input their own resumes. The database will then feed both Quark and the student resumes portion of the site. Because a lot of this will be pasting out of MS Word, had to deal with the smart/curly quotes problem.

Took a while to figure out that the quotes were represented by HTML entities #8220; and #8221. “Smart” dashes were 8211. The final solution looked like this:

$foo = str_replace(“&#8220”, “\””, $bar);

Repeat for right quote and smart dash, for each affected variable. Also set up browser-based image uploading, so students can upload their own faces.

Music: Ozric Tentacles :: Mysticum Arabicola

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