Frustrations

[xtanitx]

Okay, so I'm trying to save some stories from Geocities, but they have these stupid and irritating symbols where punctuation should be (you know, crazy punctuation that's never used, like apostrophes. Yes, you did just feel the roll of my eyes across the vast gulf of the internet) -- Looks like this:



Am I being stupid and trying to copy & paste the text to a .doc or .txt file? Is there a way to do a search and replace for ...whatever the hell those are? Saving as a .txt removes the question mark symbol thingy, but doesn't put the correct punctuation in place, and I have more important things to do than go through pages and pages of fic typing in missing apostrophes and quotation marks. Copying the text directly to Word gets me the symbols, at least (which is slightly better than no punctuation at all) but Word has its own issues with formatting.

What am I missing? Or do I just suck it up and deal with funky symbols and learn yet another lesson on the pitfalls of procrastination?

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller? Has anyone seen Bueller?

Never mind! I figured it out. If anyone else is having this issue, it's a matter of changing the encoding that Firefox uses to view the websites. Go to View-->Character Encoding-->Western (Windows 1252) [Mine was set to Unicode, I think it's the default...whatever the case, Firefox and Geocities did not get along trying to talk to each other that way]

Comments

[abelina.livejournal.com]

The only thing I can think to suggest ...

Can you copy the weird symbol and then paste it into the "find" box of the find/replace in Word?

[xtanitx.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I tried, but no luck with that method. Was a good thought though! You can do a find & replace, but it somehow makes the situation worse. I think it was finding other unrecognizable characters and replacing them as well.

BUT! I did get it sorted. I had to change the way Firefox looks at the character encoding. I stumbled on that blindly, who the hell would think to actually look THERE, you know? Once I did that, I can copy and paste the text with no ill effects into Word, and what do you know, it's readable.

To totally bastardize a classic: And there was much joy in Mudville. :D

[dawnofme.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting the fix. That might come in handy in the future. :)

[xtanitx.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! It would be great if it helps save someone a headache. :)