JavaScript: bookmarklet to show UTF-8 characters correctly

Question

I am reading some pages that don't display correctly some UTF-8 characters. For example this page shows â€“ instead of en dash (–).

Others:

showing â€™ instead of ’

showing â€˜ instead of ‘ (see this page)

Is it possible to fix this problem in a bookmarklet? If yes, then how?

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 25 '13 at 05:37

With a bookmarklet, no. Unfortunately most browsers don't provide a method to change the page encoding with javascript. You may try adding a meta tag to affect the encoding but this may not work with all browsers (google "meta tag encoding"). This is primarily a server issue - the web server sent the wrong encoding header for the page.

However, if you want a menu item that you can invoke from the browser to change the encoding (which is basically what a bookmarklet is anyway) you can simply invoke the encoding menu and change it to UTF-8. On IE8 it's Page->Encoding->UTF8, on Chrome it's Menu->Tools->Encoding->UTF8. Google around for other browsers.

Maybe you can't change the encoding but you can simply replace text. — BearCode, Mar 25 '13 at 05:41

score -1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:57

I found the solution, being helped by the other question:

javascript:
function htmlreplace(a, b, element) {    
    if (!element) element = document.body;    
    var nodes = element.childNodes;
    for (var n=0; n<nodes.length; n++) {
        if (nodes[n].nodeType == Node.TEXT_NODE) {
            var r = new RegExp(a, 'gi');
            nodes[n].textContent = nodes[n].textContent.replace(r, b);
        } else {
            htmlreplace(a, b, nodes[n]);
        }
    }
}
htmlreplace("â€“","–");
htmlreplace("â€™","’");
htmlreplace("â€˜","‘");
htmlreplace("â€œ","“");
htmlreplace("â€ž","„");

Awesome!

JavaScript: bookmarklet to show UTF-8 characters correctly

2 Answers2