Special characters such as " ' - display oddly
Special characters such as " ' - display oddly when opening a filed saved as htm only. The characters display properly in Chrome or Opera. This problem does not exist when opening a mht file or a file waved with SaveWE, but these two file saving methods create very large files.I'd like to use Firefox and make it the default browser for opening files.
Here is an example: BERLIN — Germany, an anchor of stability in Europe, faced a political crisis on Monday after late-night.... The breakdown of the talks on Sunday night ....the West’s most ardent defender of democratic values and freedoms.
It should be like this:BERLIN — Germany, an anchor of stability in Europe, faced a political crisis on Monday after late-night .... The breakdown of the talks on Sunday night.... the West’s most ardent defender of democratic values and freedoms.
Any ideas?
All Replies (7)
This is likely a problem with the text encoding and an 8-bit Western or Windows encoding is selected instead of Unicode. Currently you see the individual bytes that make these Unicode characters. If setting the text encoding to Unicode doesn't help then it is possible that Unicode content is saved as 8-bit ASCII text.
- View -> Text Encoding
- you can tap the Alt key or press the F10 key to show the hidden Menu Bar temporarily
See also:
Thank you for the tip. Indeed, the file encoding was Western. When I click on Unicode, the special characters display properly. When I then re-saved the page it went back to Western encoding. Is there any way to make it save in Unicode?
I forgot to add that the encoding on the original article, in the New York Times, is in Unicode. When saving as html only, the encoding switches to Western. It would be nice to be able to save, or convert the encoding back to Unicode.
One thing I notice about NYTimes is that it does not have either of these tags:
- <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
- <meta charset="UTF-8" />
When a page does have that tag, Firefox seems to save it as UTF-8, and when it's missing, Firefox uses my local encoding of Windows-1252.
I thought perhaps if I inject a tag into the page before saving, using this in the Web Console, that would fix it:
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].insertAdjacentHTML('afterbegin', '<meta charset="UTF-8" />');
But it didn't help, maybe because "Save Page As" saves the page as it was served rather than as it has been modified?
So an alternate strategy would be to just use a completely independent way to save the page, but that's a huge load of script, not a one-liner, so perhaps best suited for an add-on.
Pity we can't resolve this problem. The page I saved as "html only" was 96 KB. If I save it with SaveWE it is 1.46 MB. I suppose this isn't such a great deal, but it is nice to be efficient and have small file sizes.
What bugs me is that Chrome and Opera open the files in Unicode while Firefox doesn't. Unicode is Chrome's default encoding.
If Chrome can do it, could Firefox do the same, and ensure that html files opened from our computers open in Unicode encoding and not Western?
Save Page WE is adding to the page, obviously. Not sure what all that is. Maybe images?
Opening the saved nytimes page on disk and manually pasting
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
just after the <head> tag solves the problem, but I haven't thought of a way to automate that so you don't have to do it.
This does seem to permanently render the encoding to Unicode. Thank you. I noticed that now, when I opened the modified file, and click on View, the letters for Encoding are greyed out. At least now I can have a completely readable file. It also forces me to check the file once I've saved it so I can see if it saved properly. Some files don't.
I appreciate your sharing your knowledge with me.