Character Entity Vs. Numeric Entry

[mrb712]

I need some advice. I have been using character entities for my special characters (eacute, ccedil, mdash) for a long time. It's easy to remember the characters that way. But recently, I noticed one of my pages displaying very odd characters, not the ones I had coded. It seems that sometime after I had uploaded the page, the characters in the file on the server were replaced by other characters. So I replaced the character entities with numeric entries (#233, #231, #8212), and it seems to have solved the problem.

 

But my question is why this happened at all? Does it have to do with the document's encoding? I haven't ever paid attention to content types before; I always used the default of what the web design program was giving me.

 

So, it's not critical, I'm just trying to understand whether the character entities are really OK to use on the page.

 

Hope this makes sense. I appreciate any help or guidance,

Michael

[HCSuperStores]

This is probably related to the scripting language that you use to process your input.

 

I use Perl, and it does not support some of the UTF class of characters.

 

In order to get around this, I use javascript to clean up the data ahead of time, replacing the unique quotes and dashes with plain, ordinary characters.

 

This is just my expereince, there may be other reasons.

 

Good luck!

 

Bill H