I got a technical question recently which I thought to share.
Not so long ago in the history of Web Development, the safest way to display non-Western text was the use of numeric entity codes. For instance, one course management system would convert Cyrillic text like Україна (Ukraine) to a series of numeric codes like:
Ч&#x;країла
This is fine for single words and small phrases, but it’s bad for an entire page…especially if you want to edit it.
Fortunately, there is a quasi-fix for this if you need to replace numeric codes with real text. That is:
- Open your page in a browser which does render the entity codes as the correct text.
- Copy displayed text and paste it in another file. It will be rendered as text.
- Put the text back into your HTML source.
It’s a little tedious, but since I couldn’t quickly find a better tool for this, it is a decent stop gap. At least you won’t have to re-type everything…
