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.

Choose UTF-8

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.

Published by

Julian Bez

Julian Bez

Julian Bez is a software engineer and former startup founder from Berlin, Germany.