I am trying to retrieve specific information from a European web site. Now, the problem is I am often facing strings containing special characters such as "ä". When I try to write same into a text file it is coming as "�a". How to avoid this? My code is in VB.Net. There are no html codes for special characters in the response.
TIA!
In general, you should be able to do this by using the appropriate character coding for UTF-8 (which is what I assume you are trying to convert to)
Here is a list of HTML Codes.
Looks like the one you are wanting is:
Character Friendly Code Numerical Code Hex Code Description
ä ä ä ä Lowercase A-umlaut
Hope that helps.
I tried using WebBrowser instead of HttpRequest and Its working.
Related
Is there any way to type this word "हिन्दी中文(简体)" in html?
I see that there's codes for special characters in html for example for "العربية" العبية
But I can't find these codes for this "हिन्दी中文(简体)"
There are tools out there that can do this conversion from raw Unicode symbols to encoded HTML entities.
हिन्दी中文(简体)
Yes, you can write “हिन्दी中文(简体)” as “हिन्दी中文(简体)” in HTML. Naturally, you need a character encoding that lets you do that, primarily UTF-8, but that’s a good idea anyway.
You can write any character using a character reference like ह (for U+0939 DEVANAGARI LETTER HA, “ह”), but this increases the data size and makes the HTML code look very obscure.
I am building a website for a German client, so the text on the website will regularly contain characters like:
ä
ö
ü
ß
Is it necessary for to convert all those characters to their HTML Entities while the website uses UTF-8 character encoding everywhere?
Or maybe there's no relation between the two areas?
When (if at all) should I convert those to their HTML Entities, then?
You should convert to HTML entity or character references when:
a. you are stuck with some editor or processing component that doesn't support Unicode properly;
b. you have manually-edited markup with confusable characters. For example, if you have a non-breaking-space that is important to lay out correctly, you might want to write it as or so that it's obvious and doesn't get replaced with a normal space when someone edits the file.
Other than that, no, just go with the raw versions.
Although I included the ISO-8859-1 content-type META, my website isn't displaying special characters, such as ã and ê. If I 'echo' a string from a MYSQL query, the special character is displaying properly. If I write the SAME character in plain HTML, it won't display in the same website.
Thanks in advance.
http://popguest.com.br/event/index3.php?c=48&p=3
Maybe you could use a simple routine to encode all special characters to entities (&#x----; with correct hexadecimal unicode number after x)
(and switching to UTF-8 is not a bad idea)
I'm making a static HTML page that displays courtesy text in multiple languages. I noticed that if I paste ウェブサイトのメンテナンスの下で into Expression Blend, that text appears the same in the code. I think it's bad for compatibility and should be replaced by proper HTML entities.
I have tried http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/DotNet/Tools/HTMLEncode/encode.aspx but it returns me the same Japanese text.
Is it correct, from the point of view of browser compatibility, to paste that Japanese right into the source code of an HTML page?
Else, what is the correct HTML encoding of that text? Or, better, is there any tool that I can use to convert non-ASCII characters to HTML entities, possibly online and possibly free?
I think it's bad for compatibility and should be replaced by proper
HTML entities.
Quite the opposite actually, your preference should be to not use html entities but rather correctly declare document encoding as UTF-8 and use the actual characters. There are quite a few compelling reasons to do so, but the real question is why not use it since it's a well- and widely supported standard?
Some of those points have been summarised previously:
UTF-8 encodings are easier to read and edit for those who understand
what the character means and know how to type it.
UTF-8 encodings are just as unintelligible as HTML entity encodings
for those who don't understand them, but they have the advantage of
rendering as special characters rather than hard to understand decimal
or hex encodings.
[For example] Wikipedia... actually go through articles and convert
character entities to their corresponding real characters for the sake
of user-friendliness and searchability.
As long as you mark your web-page as UTF-8, either in the http headers or the meta tags, having foreign characters in your web-pages should be a non-issue. Alternately you could encode/decode these strings using encodeURI/decodeURI functions in JavaScript
encodeURI('ウェブサイトのメンテナンスの下で')
//returns"%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A7%E3%83%96%E3%82%B5%E3%82%A4%E3%83%88%E3%81%AE%E3%83%A1%E3%83%B3%E3%83%86%E3%83%8A%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B9%E3%81%AE%E4%B8%8B%E3%81%A7"
decodeURI("%E3%82%A6%E3%82%A7%E3%83%96%E3%82%B5%E3%82%A4%E3%83%88%E3%81%AE%E3%83%A1%E3%83%B3%E3%83%86%E3%83%8A%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B9%E3%81%AE%E4%B8%8B%E3%81%A7")
//returns ウェブサイトのメンテナンスの下で
If you are looking for a tool to convert a bunch of static strings to unicode characters, you could simply use encodeURI/decodeURI functions from a web-page developer console (firebug for mozilla/firefox). Hope this helps!
HTML entities are only useful if you need to represent a character that cannot be represented in the encoding your document is saved in. For example, ASCII has no specification for how to represent "€". If you want to use that character in an ASCII encoded HTML document, you have to encode it as € or not use it at all.
If you are using a character encoding for your document that can represent all the characters you need though, like UTF-8, there's no need for HTML entities. You simply need to make sure the browser knows what encoding the document is in so it can interpret it correctly. This is really the preferable method, since it simply keeps the source code readable. It really makes no sense to want to work with HTML entities if you can simply work with the actual characters.
See http://kunststube.net/frontback for some more information.
I'm receiving data from my database, and I'm showing it through echo statements, but for some reason all the basic punctuation eg (',") are all returning small diamonds with Questionmarks inside of them, can someone tell me what is wrong?
It sounds like you may need to escape some of those special characters. Here is a list of escape codes that you can use:
Escape Character Codes
If using these codes doesn't work, make sure that the actual document encoding matches the UTF-8 encoding specified. This can be examined in a text editor like Notepad++.