I have problems with special charaters like é á ñ etcetera.

I am making a website together with some friends. I write everything in Expression Web, using UTF-8. When I publish my files to the server, everything is ok.
All my files contain the tag:

My friends use CoffeeCup. If they download my files from the server, make some changes in my files using CoffeeCup and than upload the files to the server again, we get a lot of strange characters.

When I download the changed files from the server and try to correct them, all the special characters are disappeared and I have to correct all the words with special characters.

What can we do?
a. Is it possible to open, change and save files in CoffeeCup if that files were made with another program in UTF-8 without having problems with special characters (and if so, what do my friends have to do to avoid problems)?

b. If a. is not possible: I can save all my files as ISO 8859-1 (and put the tag charset=iso-8859-1 in my files). Is that a solution of the problem? (although I don't really like to do it this way)

c. Is there another solution maybe?

Hiya bvol..

When you are inserting these special characters are you using the html code for the character or a foreign (to me lol) keyboard that has them already on it? If the latter, you'll need to figure out how to insert these characters using the correct coding or setup within Expresssion Web so that they are correctly being shown to all. The problem here is that I'm going to guess your other people are not all using the same keyboard language and therefore loading it up in CoffeeCup's HTML Editor will change those keys to normal keys because in HTML you must use the correct syntax for your characters to show up.

The easiest way to do this is to open the HTML Editor and on the left side you'll see a bunch of tabs, one of them is for Characters. Open that tab and find the characters you are trying to insert and insert them one at a time and copy that code it is creating and use that code for inserting your special characters.

Hope that helps, please let us know if that isn't the trouble or if there are other things not coming out right etc, as I don't use Expression Web I'm unable to tell you anything about special characters on that program.

I use expression web and I know that it does not have the same character set that html editor does. So it might benefit you to use exclusively CC html editor as I think that going back and forth between the two is what is causing your problem. Expression has its own way of rendering characters (as does CC), but Expression does not provide the extra support that html editor does (the characters tab).

What's not to like about iso-8859-1?
That's what you should be using and all will be good!

Like per said, use iso-8859-1 when creating your pages in Expression Web. Then the CC html editor will no longer change the text. If your text content is also made up of languages that aren't supported by the Western European character set and you don't want to use entities, then you will need to continue using utf-8, but your friend will need to change to an editor compatible with unicode, or he'll continue to change your text.

It has Insert > Symbol...

That will automatically insert the equivalent entity if the current encoding doesn't support the selected character.

Thanks Jo Ann and Eric.

I am using a keybord with US-keybord layout, so if I want an "é" I first type a " ' " and after that a "e".
My friends use the almost same keybord layout (the ES-keybord-layout). The difference is that they have the ñ as an extra key (but the other accents they have to type the same way as I do).

Until now I never used the html-codes like é because in Expression Web I can type my text as normal text (as I would type it in Word for instance) and saving my files as utf-8 I never had a problem with my websites. All the accents show up as they should do.

If I understand you well, Jo Ann and Eric, in CoffeeCup the best way to avoid problems is to use the Characters tab. I suppose that wil insert codes like é .

Because I make all the text and my friends only make small changes, they will have to change all the letters with accents to html-codes, or I need to type everything with that codes right away.

If it is the only way to do it, we will do so, but if anyone knows another way, please let me know.

I would like to keep using Expression Web and write my text without html-codes and my friends would like to keep using CC without changing all my letters with accents to codes.

In my tests, opening a page in cc, editing some html, and then resaving didn't mess up any characters, so I'm not sure how your friend is changing the text. Hence, I don't know how he can avoid changing your characters, which is why I suggest either changing the character set, or changing his editor.

ok, Per, Cary,

I just saw your messages after responding to Jo Ann.

I think there's nothing wrong with iso 8859-1 because all we write is in spanish. I don't need other special characters. It's just that I am used to use utf-8 (and some part of the website uses data from a database in utf-8).

I will give it a try and make some pages in iso 8859-1. Thanks.

Good luck on it bvoll.. Hopefully that will fix your problems and you'll be able to just keep on creating