Conversion of special characters to entities

[John Gruber]

Lasar Liepins <lasar at liepins.net> wrote on 03/09/05 at 7:43 pm:

> Apparently MarkDown does not convert special characters that possess
> HTML entity equivalents. Examples are German Umlauts (ä becomes &auml;
> etc), which often come up in my documents, with me being German and all
> that. 
[...]
> So is this something that would make sense to be built into MarkDown, or
> is there a good reason to not do it?

No, I don't think this belongs in Markdown at all. Right now
Markdown is happily encoding-agnostic. The only characters it treats
specially are in the ASCII range, and anything else should thus pass
through unchanged.

I highly recommend using UTF-8 for your entire publishing workflow
-- compose in UTF-8, store in UTF-8, publish in UTF-8. It really
"just works".

But even if you're using ISO-8859 or the Windows Latin-1 encodings,
Markdown won't screw with your characters.

To me, automatic entification of non-ASCII characters is never an
appealing feature.

-J.G.