On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 17:10:30 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Ken Blake
writes:
[]
The problem is that my text editor (Gvim) isn't handling the dastardly
characters, so all I want to do is get rid of any character that any normal
text editor can't/won't/doesn't handle.


"Normal text editor"? I just pasted curly quotes into Notepad to be
sure it handled curly quotes. It does.

If yours doesn't, I suggest you change your text editor.

The distinction is blurred. To some people, a text editor is something
that doesn't do formatting, bold, italic, underlined, fonts, etcetera
(and thus NotePad is one such); to other people, it is one that only
works with ASCII codes 32 to 126 plus newline. There _are_ places where
only the latter is valid. (Headerless usenet, for example, though ANSI
characters _usually_ get through that unaltered.)


To me, there are word processors (e.g. WordPerfect and Word), text
editors (e.g. Notepad) and *glorified* text editors (e, g. WordPad).

As far as I'm concerned, WordPad is a useless program. I don't need
anything in between a word processor and a text editor. Microsoft
probably provides WordPad for those people who don't want to spend the
money on a real word processor, but I think those people would be much
better off with Open Office or Libre Office.