ASP.NET Smart quotes parsing issue in a CSV file

Question

The ASP.NET application that I've been working on parses regular quotes and symbols happily. Other than the smart quotes in the CSV file created using MS Excel.

The following is the code I use:

for (int i = 0; i < ds.Tables["Comments"].Rows.Count; i++) {
value = ParseSmartQuotes(ds.Tables["Comments"].Rows[i][col.FieldName].ToString());

Within the ParseSmartQuotes method, I tried a lot of things. Some of them include:

A solution to replace the smart quotes with regular quotes (or) display the smart quotes as such in the web page would be highly appreciated.

Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/334850/c-how-to-replace-microsofts-smart-quotes-with-straight-quotation-marks — James Johnson, Aug 08 '11 at 21:44
Tried that, but didn't seem to work for me (I've attached that thread in the question as the ones I tried). — Aswin Ramakrishnan, Aug 08 '11 at 21:47

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 08 '11 at 22:12

Your parsing code shouldn't be confused by smart quotes. The parser should only look for ASCII quotes as delimiters; smart quotes should be regarded as content--not delimiters--and stored as Unicode.

Is your parser written from scratch? If so, why? There is a high-quality CSV reader available that has worked well for me. It doesn't have any special handling for smart quotes, but it handles Unicode.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 08 '11 at 21:46

0

One of the replies within the second link mentions html encoding the text. Have you tried that? Here is the link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/73z22y6h.aspx

answered Aug 08 '11 at 21:46

evasilchenko

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What was the outcome of this? What are some of the problems you've encountered? – evasilchenko Aug 08 '11 at 22:08

ASP.NET Smart quotes parsing issue in a CSV file

2 Answers2