We've always wanted to be able to set up Joomla to automatically add a "Read More" link for articles in Category Blog or Section Blog Layouts so that the articles would all be the same length and they would line up just as pretty as you please.  Google revealed a handful of other people attempting the same thing, but having no solution.  So Mango wrote a plugin for it.

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Alternate title: "Help!  My Quotes Appear as Question Marks or Other Strange Characters!"

The "Smart quotes" feature in Microsoft Office transforms straight quotes into curly quotes.  It also transforms hyphens into em-dashes and three periods into ellipses.  While one might think, "How lovely!  My document looks almost as if I'm educated!" readers of said document may not.  Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided to assign special characters such as the ones I just mentioned to a range of codes above 128.  Problem: these codes were already assigned to other characters, resulting in frustrating incompatibility with non-Microsoft systems.

Keep reading for some PHP and MySQL code to help out with this issue, as well as a Joomla! plugin.

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