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I have some pages I'm copying Chinese text into from a Word doc. I have 2 kind of HTML documents. Some are parent pages, with a full head tag, and meta tag, where I have spec'd:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

I also have some snippets that just start with <div> because they are include files.

When I paste Chinese into the docs with the meta tag, it pastes fine and I can see the Chinese.

When I paste Chinese into the HTML snippets that start with a <div>, I just get boxes.

How do I paste Chinese into a snippet so that I can see the characters?

In Dreamweaver, I can flip over to visual mode and paste them in, but when I flip back to code mode, It shows me that all the characters have been converted to URL encoded equivalents. On the UTF-8 page, I can paste the Chinese and read it in code mode as Chinese characters.

HOWEVER

The weird thing is I have several include files. One I opened up has no meta tag on it, and it already had Chinese in it from development I did a few weeks back. I can still paste new Chinese into it and it's fine.

So basically, I have regular old HTML files, with no meta tag about UTF-8, and some allow me to paste Chinese into them in code mode and it works fine, and others don't allow it. The structure of these various HTML snippets are nearly identical.

Could this be a DreamWeaver bug or is there some trick / setting?

Makoto
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dbonneville
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2 Answers2

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You cannot do so reliably without some sort of metadata; in HTML, that is what the <meta> tag is for. (Otherwise the browser will have to guess, and uses the default that the user has chosen. Which, in most cases, is anything but what one expects.)

user502515
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  • So I had 2 nearly identical .html snippets. One I could paste into, one I could not. I simply saved over the bad one with the good one, and now it works. My guess is DW was acting up. There was little difference in these tiny HTML fragments, just a few div tags. DW must have been confused about the one that wouldn't allow pasting. Neither of them of course can have meta info because they are just fragments, saved and used as includes. – dbonneville Dec 02 '10 at 02:28
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Dreamweaver also has to determine the encoding of the files it opens, and in the absence of metadata it will presumably use the same techniques as a web browser (such as detecting byte sequences / character distributions that are only likely to appear in a specific encoding) to come up with a best guess.

This is the likely reason why one snippet opened with the correct encoding and another did not. Once open, Dreamweaver "knows" that a file is encoded with UTF-8, so it can continue to use UTF-8 for that file (and may even add a BOM when saving, to ensure it opens correctly in future) which is probably why saving over the bad one with the good one fixed the issue.

A good editor will let you specify the encoding to use when opening (and saving) a file. You can do this in Dreamweaver via Modify > Page Properties (see: UTF-8 Without BOM?).

Community
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Paul Fenney
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