Special characters cause an error in the Aegis Input Builder when copied from Microsoft Word (NETIQKB71218)

  • 7771218
  • 21-Aug-2008
  • 15-Jun-2011

Environment

NetIQ Aegis 1.5
NetIQ Aegis 2.X

Situation

Special characters cause an error in the Aegis Input Builder when copied from Microsoft Word.

When copying content from Microsoft Word to the Aegis Input Builder, some special characters cause an error.

The Special Characters - and " will cause an error to be generated by the Aegis Input Builder if they are copied over from Microsoft Word.

Resolution

Microsoft has a knowledgebase article discussing this behavior, and provides the steps to turn this functionality off for some special characters:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/206165

For example, steps that you can use to turn off the auto-reformat of " marks are as follows (from the KB listed above):

As you type text, some Microsoft Office programs automatically change straight quotation marks ( ' or " ) to curly quotation marks (also known as "smart quotes" or typographer's quotes). You can turn on or off this feature.

  1. Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Word Options.
  2. Click Proofing, and then click AutoCorrect Options.
  3. In the AutoCorrect dialog box, do the following:
    • Click the AutoFormat As You Type tab, and under Replace as you type, select or clear the "Straight quotes" with ?smart quotes? check box.
    • Click the AutoFormat tab, and under Replace, select or clear the "Straight quotes" with ?smart quotes? check box.

Alternately, you can copy the text from Microsoft Word to Notepad and the special characters will then be in Plain Text format, which will not cause this issue.

Cause

The issue occurs when a user copies and pastes from text from a Microsoft Word document.  Microsoft Word will convert some characters like - and " to rich text characters automatically.  When you paste these characters back in to Input Builder, the activity will fail.

Additional Information

Formerly known as NETIQKB71218