Unable to email em dash

[tscrip]

Prerequisites

• Put an X between the brackets on this line if you have done all of the following:
  • Can you reproduce the problem on a fresh install or the [http://rock.rocksolidchurchdemo.com/ demo site ]()?
  • Did you include your Rock version number and [https://github.com/SparkDevNetwork/Rock/wiki/Environment-and-Diagnostics-Information client culture ]() setting?
  • Did you [https://github.com/issues?q=is%3Aissue+user%3ASparkDevNetwork+-repo%3ASparkDevNetwork%2FSlack perform a cursory search ]() to see if your bug or enhancement is already reported?

Description

We are trying to send an email with some external content. The content occasionally has an em or en dash. When an email is generated from Rock, em dashed are always converted to a regular dash. I am not sure if it is strictly limited to em dashes, but that is all that I have tested with.

Troubleshooting steps taken:

• Tried with the dash formatted like the following: —``—``—
• Tried sending through MailGun and SendGrid
• Tried receiving at both Outlook and Gmail
• Examined data in Communication table and can confirm it is stored in correct format

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open New communication
2. Select recipient and template
3. Enter this in the body of the email: HTML: &mdash; <br/>Decimal: &#8212; <br/>Hex: &#x2014;
4. Click send
5. Review results in mail client

Expected behavior:

em dash is render correctly

Actual behavior:

em dash is being rendered as regular dash

Versions

• Rock Version: 6.10, 7.2
• Client Culture Setting: en-US

[jgrabrian]

Reviewed logs in Mailgun after testing and confirmed that it received the message with a regular dash.

[MichaelAllen]

This appears to affects all communication transports, not just Email. However, I'm not sure if it is a bug or intended behavior.

In Rock.Communication.TransportComponent the ResolveText method is calling Rock.Extension.ReplaceWordChars( ) to strip "special" characters (em dash included). This appears to be designed to cleanup text pasted in from MS word or similar.

I see 2 options for fixing this, if it is indeed a bug.

1. Don't "cleanup" the communication body, take whatever the user types.
   Removing this line would accomplish that for all types of communications. (Alternative: add a conditional to only cleanup SMS messages since they have a limited charset.)
   

   Rock/Rock/Communication/TransportComponent.cs

   Line 131 in 074fa4f

   value = value.ReplaceWordChars();

2. Remove "em dash" and "en dash" from the list of things that get cleaned up. (Still clean up other things like smart quotes and ellipses)
   Removing these 2 lines would accomplish that:
   

   Rock/Rock/Utility/ExtensionMethods/StringExtensions.cs

   Lines 914 to 915 in 074fa4f

   	// dashes
   	s = Regex.Replace( s, "[\u2013\u2014]", "-" );

   
   (Not sure where else this method gets used, so this solution may have unintended consequences.)
   It is probably better to make a new cleanup method that doesn't remove dashes and replace the line referenced in option 1 with a call to that method instead.

I'm willing to submit a PR for either solution, I'm just not sure which is the better option.

[jonedmiston]

This issue is a duplicate of: #2818

We will correct and test the fix for the characters described in #2818 when fixing this issue.