Form Validation to remove smart quotes/special characters

emcneill

I'm trying to use javascript to validate a textarea form field in a dcr. I want to check the field for smart quotes (ie ‘ and “ when pasting from word) and other special characters (like ndash and accented letters) and display a warning to the user. Our editors usually try to replace these fields with the corresponding html value before pasting, but they miss them occasionally.

I'm using javascript to search for the characters. When I created a test html file (see attached) I was able to match all these characters:

‘ ’ “ ” Ç ü é â ä

When I copied that same code into a js file called by the dcr and pointing to the field that I want to validate, it doesn't find any of these.

I want the validation to be part of the save process so it is currently set up as an onSave event. There are multiple fields in the form that will need validating.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

ISCBorisB

I'm trying to use javascript to validate a textarea form field in a dcr. I want to check the field for smart quotes (ie ‘ and “ when pasting from word) and other special characters (like ndash and accented letters) and display a warning to the user. Our editors usually try to replace these fields with the corresponding html value before pasting, but they miss them occasionally. I'm using javascript to search for the characters. When I created a test html file (see attached) I was able to match all these characters: ‘ ’ “ ” Ç ü é â ä When I copied that same code into a js file called by the dcr and pointing to the field that I want to validate, it doesn't find any of these. I want the validation to be part of the save process so it is currently set up as an onSave event. There are multiple fields in the form that will need validating. Any suggestions would be welcome.

You seem to have encoding mix-up.

DCRs are stored in (multi-byte) UTF-8 Format. For example, lower case e-grave (é) converts to two bytes, é (0xC3A9).
If I were you I would try this sort of validation with the CGI-Callout or callServer to some Perl or Java code (eg, not in pure Java Script)