Escape characters in MySQL, in Ruby

Posted by Swards on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Swards
Published on 2010-04-23T19:53:45Z Indexed on 2010/04/23 22:43 UTC
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I have a couple escaped characters in user-entered fields that I can't figure out.

I know they are the "smart" single and double quotes, but I don't know how to search for them in mysql.

The characters in ruby, when output from Ruby look like \222, \223, \224 etc

irb> "\222".length => 1

So - do you know how to search for these in mysql? When I look in mysql, they look like '?'.

I'd like to find all records that have this character in the text field. I tried

mysql> select id from table where field LIKE '%\222%' 

but that did not work.

Some more information - after doing a mysqldump, this is how one of the characters is represented - '\\xE2\\x80\\x99'. It's the smart single quote.

Ultimately, I'm building an RTF file and the characters are coming out completely wrong, so I'm trying to replace them with 'dumb' quotes for now. I was able to do a gsub(/\222\, "'").

Thanks.

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