Use Notepad to edit UTF-8 files

My WordPress installation encodes pages in UTF-8. As long as you use only the WordPress front-end everything is all right. But when it comes to edit other files, especially with German umlauts, I got a problem.

I soon recognized that my PHP editor (which I use to edit every web-related text-file) doesn’t like UFT-8 very much. Instead of “�”, he shows me “ä”. That would not be the problem if you don’t have to write umlauts.

Pages which where already there had to be converted to UTF-8. So change every instance of “�” to “ä” by hand? No! By accident I found an easy method to convert files to UTF-8. Microsoft Notepad. Yeah, really. Just open the desired file in notepad. Select “save as”. Change encoding to UTF-8. Save it. Voil�.

When I have to make changes to a page, I can simply open notepad without having to worry about encoding. The fact that my FTP client can open files in notepad by default makes it still more easily.