Display of special characters such as ë and è 
Author: Carlo L.
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I am having issues with incorrect displaying of special characters on my website, such as ë and è. These are converted into strange combinations of several other strange characters.
Currently I work around that by using alternative words or small misspellings (therefor I have no current examples to show), but I feel the use of these characters should be possible. In preview mode they look perfect; but after uploading it goes wrong.
In the related messages that I was pointed at before posting this, I read something about "forcing to use UTF-8" or the like, but concrete advice I could not derive from that. Who can help me?
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Hello Carlo,
WebSite X5 uses UTF-8 encoding by default, so I'm quietly confident that your issue will be server side. I had a quick look at your host's FAQ to see if I could spot any relevant information, but it's all double-dutch to me (pun intended)
http://www.digitalus.nl/veel_gestelde_vragen
Short of submitting a support request to your web host directly, you could try adding the following lines to your .htaccess file in the root folder of your WebSite X5 project on your server:
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
AddType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' html
If you don't currently have an .htaccess file set up on your server then you can easily create one... let us know if you need help with that.
Kind regards,
Paul
Author
hi Paul,
Thanks for explaining this. I have checked for the existence of the file, it does not seem to exist yet. Do I understand correctly that I should simply create a file named ".htaccess" (with nothing in front of the dot) and copy those line in italics into it? Then put that file into the root folder on the server (where the rest of website stuff is located)?
thx again, Carlo
Yes, that's right... you can create an empty text file in Notepad, upload it to your server, then rename it to remove the .txt file extension and leave it simply as .htaccess
Then just copy those two lines into it. The italics aren't required (I added them to try and improve legibility), but I'm sure you know that already
Put the .htaccess into the root folder of your WebSite X5 project, which may or may not be the same as the root folder on your server overall. The important thing to understand here is that any .htaccess files will influence not just the contents of the folder they are placed in, but also all child folders under them.
If it doesn't cure the issue first time then there are a couple of small tweaks we can try later.
Author
Excellent Paul, I proceeded as you said and it worked flawlessly! Thanks a lot.
Only 1 thing: I am using Total Commander (TC) as an ftp tool. But once I rename the file into something without a name before the dot, the file seems to disappear. Nevertheless, it must still be there to judge from its action. I have selected the option "show all files" so TC does not even recognize it as an hidden file... Any thoughts on this, or maybe alternative ways of checking the existence of this files?
I'm not familiar with Total Commander so I can't comment from experience, but I did a little searching on the web and quickly discovered other TC users have had similar issues in not being able to see the .htaccess file.
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any 'fix' as such... the advice given seemed to be mostly "use another FTP client"
You might find post #10 in this thread particularly interesting:
http://forum.en.altervista.org/services/257-htaccess-visibility-via-ftp.html
And I recommend reading the following entire thread:
http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=26075&highlight=htaccess&sid=a3a8c5ce138f5877ded28cc6d6309645
Note the comment towards the end of the thread...
...I just discovered that the "show hidden files" is different from "FTP Show Hidden Files"...
Sorry, I can't be of further help. For what it's worth I have used FileZilla for years and never had any problems of that nature.
Author
Thanks Paul, fair enough... will mark the answer above as correct, since, well... it is!
thanks for all help, Carlo