Discussion about special characters in Portable Text to HTML conversion

Does the portable text to html accept special characters? We need to be able to put characters like Ă (we currently have the old blocks to html, but will be upgrading soon)

I believe it does! Is that not the behavior you're getting?

It works fine with emojis, Japanese characters, Cyrillic characters, etc. So it should be fine, there is no reason these characters won’t work. They’re not more special than any other. :)

I am able to get some special characters to work with our current blocks to html, but not all. Here is a screenshot from a coworker of what she is trying to insert vs what she gets

And here is what I type in vs what I get

Is it possible that those characters don't exist in the font you're using?

This looks like an encoding issue, not a font issue. For example, á (a with acute) is represented in UTF-8 encoding by the two bytes

0xC3

0xA1

. Those same two bytes in Windows-1252 encoding represent à (A with tilde) followed by ¡ (inverted exclamation mark).

Is this something I can fix or is it a sanity thing or something different all together?

ooh, maybe if I can change it to UTF-16?

UTF-8 is the most common and standard encoding in the web world, so I would use that if I had the choice. Sanity's API serves the results in that encoding as far as I can see (their

Content-Type

heading says

application/json;charset=utf-8

here), so you'd have to convert it if you need something else.

Most likely you can fix it by configuring the web site (wherever the right-hand-side parts of the screenshots come from) to serve the content as UTF-8. Exactly how that is done will depend on how the site is hosted, but the HTTP header should say

Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8

.

Failing that, putting

<meta charset="utf-8">

in the actual HTML's

head

element is an option.

oh ok, I misunderstood and thought some of the characters I wanted weren't in UTF-8. Just looked at the character list and see I was incorrect. I will look at what you suggested

Many thanks for stepping in here !

Ah, no worries. UTF-8 can encode everything in Unicode, just like UTF-16 🙂

Added

<meta charset="UTF-8" />

in the preview where it was missing and it now displays as expected. So happy it was an easy fix. Thank you for the guidance!!!