Conversion of special characters to entities

[Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov]

On 9-mrt-05, at 19:43, Lasar Liepins wrote:

> Hello.
>
> Apparently MarkDown does not convert special characters that possess
> HTML entity equivalents. Examples are German Umlauts (ä becomes ä
> etc), which often come up in my documents, with me being German and all
> that. Of course I can do this with an additional script after or before
> running MarkDown over my documents, but since for example the ampersand
> is converted to &, I was wondering why such characters are not
> replaced by their respective entities.
>
> I am a little weak on the specifications of any W3C or other standard
> regarding this issue. I guess it's because such umlauts a) don't come 
> up
> all that much if you're writing in English and b) they usually work 
> fine
> without using entities, as long as the text encoding stays intact.
> However I do run into the problem that text encoding is broken at some
> point, when transferring text files between different operating 
> systems,
> applications or maybe being put into a MySQL database. It's not a rule,
> but it's something that happens. Plus I can't always be sure what a web
> site visitor's web browser thinks it sees, so entities are the safer 
> bet
> for me.
>
> So is this something that would make sense to be built into MarkDown, 
> or
> is there a good reason to not do it?

There is. Use UTF-8.
--
Julian "Julik" Tarkhanov