News You Can Bruise for 2004 November 28

I don't know why I could find no Python library equivalent of The Demoronizer, but today I got fed up with not just Microsoft smart quotes but with ISO-Latin-1 in general, and I wrote ASCII, Dammit, which will remove those characters from your string once and for all, replacing them with HTML encoded entities or with my lame guess at a plain-ASCII rendering.

I'm sure there's something you're supposed to do ahead of time to prevent Python from choking on those characters, and that I'll hear all about it soon, but this is still useful because you can use it to get rid of the Microsoft smart quotes. Everyone hates Microsoft smart quotes, right?