Getting rid of strange symbols that appear in your listings
If your listings look perfect when you enter them on our private site or via your software, yet when you view them on the realestate.co.nz they appear with question marks or strange symbols – as in the two examples below – then keep reading!
This occurs when you copy and paste text from another source into your software or our private site. The most common example is the use of apostrophes or single quotes as shown above. In Microsoft Word, which a lot of people will obviously be using, the apostrophe and simple single quote characters get replaced by what are called smart quotes. These special characters can cause problems in HTML, which is the protocol used by the internet to present text on web pages.
In order to avoid these problems, you should copy and paste your text into Notepad before you copy it to your software or our private site. Notepad is a plain text editor with none of the advanced functionality of word processing applications such as Microsoft Word. This ensures your text will be shown in its most simple form and therefore will be correctly represented on our site.
February 29 2008 12:52 am | Admin Hints & Tips
Tracy Perkins on 07 Mar 2008 at 12:39 pm #
Hi Tracy from Ray White office in Gore, I am not completely sure how to use Notepad, can you instruct me please.
regards
Tracy Perkins
Office Administrator
helping-hand on 07 Mar 2008 at 2:10 pm #
Hi Tracy,
Notepad is a program used to create text files but unlike Microsoft Word it uses only basic text formatting. So once you copy your text into Notepad the special characters used in Word will only be represented in their basic form.
So, all you need to do then is copy the text again from Notepad into your software and you will not get the problem outlined above.
Alternatively, you can just copy and paste directly from Microsoft Word into your software but then delete any quotation marks or apostrophes and just retype them. This way, you have to be careful you don’t overlook any though!
To open Notepad, just click on the ‘Start’ menu on the bottom left of your screen, click on ‘All Programs’ and then you should find Notepad under ‘Accessories’.
Hope this helps.