Smart quotes “ ” displayed as ?? in email

[ApiA]

Hi,

I am creating emails using the constant contact api. i created the content of my email in Word and then pasted it on my website which sends emails using the api. 

when I recieved the email the smart quotes in my email were replaced by ?

Even loggin onto CC showed that the contents were ? instead of ”

i even tried the same smart quote in Email name still the same issue, they get replaced by ?

Would you please let me know what steps do I need to take as the the smart quotes are displayed properly in my emails

the xml which i send has the encoding set to UTF-8.

Thanks

[DaveBerard · Accepted solution]

While you are setting the encoding to UTF-8, we store the contents of the email in an ISO-8859-1 database.  Thus, all characters outside of the ISO-8859-1 character set must be encoded for HTML rendering prior to sending them to us.  "Smart Quotes", or Left-Double-Quote and Right-Double-Quote, are not included in the ISO-8859-1 characterset.  The corresponding HTML entities for those would be:

To show	In HTML, SGML, or XML use	Displays on your system as
Left Double Quotation Mark	“	“
Right Double Quotation Mark	”	”
Left Single Quotation Mark	‘	‘
Right Single Quotation Mark (including English possessives and contractions)	’	’

[ApiA]

Thanks a ton !!!!!!!!

[GeoffreyF6]

Aloha,

I've been having a similar problem in using smart quotes in my email. In my case I'm trying you utilize the single left quote mark to replace a character called an okina in Hawaiian language. In the email draft I'm preparing I inserted the "‘" code into the text in HTML and after clicking the update button the correct character does show up.

However, after I hit save and exit out of the draft file for this email if I open the file for editing again the left quote mark has been replaced by an apostrophe! Help! Can you explain to me what could be going wrong or how to fix this problem?

Mahalo,

David Matsumoto

for Geoffrey Fells

[DaveBerard]

Is this a question about one of our editors?  If so, this is expected behavior.  Our visual editors do not support any characters outside of the ASCII-8601-1 character set and will convert many characters to the closest relative in the character set we do support.  If you are looking to get support on that or provide feedback, I would suggest contacting our support staff as this is not an API problem (this is a developer support forum for our API) but how our web UI works.

[TedH90]

Does Constant Contact have any intention to update this 1980s-era functionality?

Okay, slight exaggeration, but not much. I mean, I was driving Unicode support into apps 10-15 years ago, and I thought that was pretty late to be coming to the party. But with strict ISO-8859-1 you can't even do proper English typesetting without forcing us to corrupt our plaintext with control codes. God help us if we need to do any other language.

—Thomas, for Ted

[Elijah_G]

Hello Thomas,

We are definitely working on bringing many of our systems up to date with Unicode support. While I do not have any timelines for when you can expect to see specific changes, we are definitely working on changing this. As our various systems gain support for the Unicode character set, you will also gain that expanded capability through the API.

Thank you for your feedback!

Best Regards,

[BobK894]

What so since you can not fix the problem now you just remove the smart quotes and apostrophes?

Mine do not display as other characters, they just dont dispaly at all!

UNACCAPTABLE

[MoC66]

Learn the difference -

https://scaramanga.agency/articles/2021/do-you-know-your-straight-from-your-curlies-using-the-right-...