[X4U] converting to Plain text and apostrophes

[Doug McNutt]

At 10:28 -0800 1/21/11, cat soul wrote:
>I have a text version of my resume converted from RTF to Plain Text  using OS X's Text Edit application.
>
>I notice that in the plain text file, I have bunch of ’Äôs  where  there had been apostrophes.
>
>Why does this happen, and is there a way to prevent it? If not, I  guess I'm stuck doing search and replace...no big deal but it'd be  nice to avoid the problem in the first place.
>

That's almost surely a unicode apostrophe which is there because the originator put it there. It might be the result of asking for smart quotes. The closest ASCII equivalent is the single quote, 0x27.  Apple's TextEdit might have a converter that makes a "nearest ASCII" equivalent but I doubt it. By CY 2000 unicode was supposed to be the proper way to do things. The words "plain text" probably mean unicode to Apple's programmers.

Global replace, perhaps. Perl script certainly but there's a learning curve.

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