hyphen turns to question mark

[SillyOldDragon]

When reading from a text file that has hyphens in it and then stuff the text into a stringGrid everything is perfect in both columns except all of the hyphens turn to question marks.

Using Windows 7.  Nothing else weird.

Any ideas?

Thank you - Justine

[engkin]

My guess, your text file is Ansi encoded, while the grid needs UTF8. Use Utf8Encode

[SillyOldDragon]

Well, I think it's silly but it worked like a charm.  I now have hyphens in my StringGrid.

Thank you very much.

[eny]

Using Windows 7.  Nothing else weird.

That hyphen is probably not actually a hyphen (ascii 45) but some kind of ansi character that also looks like a hyphen.
For example text editors like Word do this.  So if you copy from there and paste into a textfile, you get this situation.
Also if the textfile is created from reading a database that is populated by end users, they might have copied/pasted 'special characters'  into text fields.

[engkin]

That hyphen is probably not actually a hyphen (ascii 45) but some kind of ansi character that also looks like a hyphen.

It is a hyphen, actually a "soft hyphen".

[eny]

actually a "soft hyphen".

As I said it's not a hyphen.

[engkin]

actually a "soft hyphen".

As I said it's not a hyphen.

What do you mean when you say "not a hyphen"?

[Mike.Cornflake]

What do you mean when you say "not a hyphen"?

This was already explained.
 

That hyphen is probably not actually a hyphen (ascii 45) but some kind of ansi character that also looks like a hyphen.

[engkin]

This was already explained.
 

That hyphen is probably not actually a hyphen (ascii 45) but some kind of ansi character that also looks like a hyphen.

Thank you Mike  .
I-1- What are the reason(s) that would prevent you from considering soft hyphen a hyphen?
II-2- Isn't ASCII 45 (XLV) used for minus character (-) as well? Wouldn't that be a reason to have a separate character for hyphen?

Please notice that I'm totally unbiased when it comes to hyphens. I do not endorse Microsoft's position on hyphens, not in their Word product nor in any other product.

[Mike.Cornflake]

:-)   First time I've seen the ASCII table in Roman Numerals.  I like that :-)

I suspect @Eny was simply explaining why "-" was appearing as a question mark.  If the character in question wasn't our XLV, the suspicion was that it was a unicode character that just happened to look like XLV when correctly decoded.  Which in fact, turned out to be the case.

I don't think any judgement over whether anything is or isn't a hyphen was intended.   

But on the offchance it was, I'm ducking out now :-)

[eny]

No reason to duck MC 
I'm happy someone actually made an effort to understand my explanation, without taking it out of (the) context (of the thread).

[engkin]

I apologize for taking your explanation out of (the) context (of the thread), twisting the meanings of your words, and putting my words in your mouth. 

[bzman24]

I've seen ASCII 151 that looks like an elongated hyphen.  In HTML it looks like a double hyphen but when converted to text it looks real close to a real hyphen (ASCII 45).  Is this a 'soft hyphen'? If not what is a 'soft hyphen' and why is it called that?

Curious

[Mike.Cornflake]

Follow the link for the wiki on soft hyphen.

It is a hyphen, actually a "soft hyphen".

[bzman24]

Mike,  Something that we have been using for years to show broken words and never knew they were called that.  Learn something new all the time.  Thanks.  Bzman