Where does character 146 (dec) come from?

One of the web sites I do has a contact from. The text box is free format though limited to a max. no. of characters and is validated to only contain the specified permitted characters.

A recent user kept getting her message rejected. By a circuitous route I was able to get the text concerned. When I looked at it I found that it contained a slightly odd looking apostrophe. Looking at it in a hex viewer I found it was 146 decimal, 92 hex. It appears to be a right closing quote in the extended ISO set used by Windows. What intrigues me is I cannot see how she managed to enter it from her keyboard. There were two other apostrophes in the message, but these were both the normal 39 decimal, 27 hex. So somehow she managed from one keyboard to generate two different apostrophe-like symbols.

I've fixed the code but am intrigued as how she got the character into a text box in a browser.

Any thoughts?

Is it a backtick "`"?

on my keyboard it's above the tab

I'd checked that one - made a file in Notepad with all keyboard characters, including that one, and viewed the file in a hex viewer.

That's 96 decimal, 60 hex. Standard ASCII

Edited by cheshire_man (Tue 07-Sep-10 18:40:29)

Hold down the <Alt> key and type 146 on the numric keypad. You can produce any character that way (although on my setup its capital A E dipthong rather than a closing quote). Thus: �.

Indeed.

But I really can't believe this person, in sending a message about some vandalism, would have done that.

Need Num Lock On to do that in IE.

Char 126 = �

Possibly they have typed the message in Word (to spell check it) then cut and pasted it into the text box - e.g. "In Text Box" �Cut & Pasted�

Well, if you've got a better explanation....

That sounds good - may also have been an email using Word as the email editor. Though still doesn't explain the two different apostrophes in the text.

You can see them and the differences in these text extracts

can't

that�s

Does Word automatically convert quotes into opening and closing ones? If so, then I think you've nailed it.