This is driving me nuts!! Apostrophe problem

HCR

Ok....here is the problem. When our user goes into enter content into a dcr she copies and pastes from word '97. What happens is if there is a W97 apostrophe (xml &rsquo it is blanked out when the resulting page is created.
What I tried to do first a few months ago was write a simple perl script to replace the wrong apostrophes with ' (ticks) so they show up. However perl for some reason WILL NOT under any circumstances allow me to do so....I know my script is working fine in that I can replace anything but these W97 apostrophes!!!
So I tried another avenue....I tried replacing them in the TPL and I had thought this was working but I guess I am wrong this is how I did it there (or tried to):
$SectionBody =~ s#’#'#g;
$SectionBody =~ s#‘#'#g;
$SectionBody =~ s#’#'#g;
Note that the first line the W97 apostrophe shows up as a reverse ` in textpad/notepad but not in this forum.
Now this doesn't work either.
Can anyone enlighten me as to how exactly I can replace these W97 apostrophes without having to manual go through each DCR? I would be very appreciative. Thanks.
HCR
ps...i had thought this worked in my pre-SP3 days but it doesn't now....

rollo

I'm not sure that you're having the same problem I did with this - mine came out as odd combinations of 'special' chars, invariable including an 'a' with a circumflex and a Euro symbol. Go figure. The weird thing is that the source code shows the original characters. Anyway, this is the ugly set of transforms that fixed it:

$text =~ s/’/'/gsi;  # ’ is what an open quote turns into
$text =~ s/‘/'/gsi;  # ‘ is what a close quote turns into
$text =~ s/“/"/gsi;  # “ is what an open double quote turns into
$text =~ s/�/"/gsi;  # � is what a close double quote turns into (last char is a Yen symbol)

I suppose you could use character codes instead of the symbols. But I didn't. The middle char in all of the transforms is the Euro currency sign, anyway.

You do always have the option of telling her to switch off the 'smart quotes' feature in Word..