I've just started using The HTML Editor and am noticing that it is inserting special characters into my files. Is there a setting for this?

Hiya Michael,

Not sure if this is it, but are you pasting that text from a place like a website or MS Word or similar visual type programs? Many times if you're going to paste text from a source, the best thing to do is paste it first into Windows Notepad or other plain text editor to strip special coding.

I'm not sure that's the issue here, but just in case it is you can check that pretty easily.

No, I haven't pasted any content. All I did was save a file after editing some of the code.

The first and the last of the 'funnies' look like the special quotation marks you get in MSWord, so Jo Ann is quite right about first pasting the text into Notepad to get rid of the formatting of those quotation marks. The hyphen in I'm is also an example of the same.

Alternatively, of course you can go through the text and edit it manually, but that could become quite cumbersome...

I wrote the above before I read your second post...

In the Editor, make sure you have the doctype set to html5 and the charset to utf-8. Then go into tools - preferences - browser testing and change your browser to IE9.

The weird symbols, do they appear when you are viewing your site in preview, or after you have uploaded?

Again, I never pasted content. I was editing a page already created. After I saved the changes, I noticed the special characters. There are several instances in the HTML file after I saved it. I only posted the first one.

In Dreamweaver there are settings for this. I was wondering if there were similar settings in HTML Editor.

Well I scoured around the forums for a little bit searching to see if there were any other culprits that cause this, and I'm pretty sure there is, but I couldn't find anything. Hopefully someone will come in and enlighten us, because the only posts I found in my search that had to do with special characters for the past 6 to 8 years has all surrounded people that copied their text from a visual place like a website page open in a browser, MS Word or Wordpad, Excel, anything that isn't a plain text editor for the most part. All the posts revolved around that so I dunno, stumped here too if that isn't the case. Good luck on it and I'll watch to see if anyone can enlighten us here

The same has happened to me when I at some stage edited a html file that was created with doctype html 4.01 or so. And the settings I mentioned above are THE settings.

Oh, forgot to say that the first time around, after having the right doctype and charset, you may still have to edit manually, but after that it should be ok.

From what I can see Inger has the answer:



Keith