From NCRs to Entities (27th April 2008)
Having moved the last article about websites from Site Surgeon to here, the scene was set for my renovation of Site Surgeon. It is now a single CV-like page which, in retrospect, is what it should always have been.
Whilst formatting the content I decided to try named character entities instead of numeric character references (NCRs).
String replacement is good enough for this task. I searched Project Cerbera’s 354 pages and 12 PHP scripts for &#. I replaced the number with the corresponding name. There’s a full comparison table of references to work from.
| Before | After | Example |
|---|---|---|
£ | £ | £ |
¦ | ¦ | ¦ |
© | © | © |
¬ | ¬ | ¬ |
° | ° | ° |
¼ | ¼ | ¼ |
½ | ½ | ½ |
¾ | ¾ | ¾ |
× | × | × |
å | å | å |
é | é | é |
ó | ó | ó |
÷ | ÷ | ÷ |
ü | ü | ü |
– | – | – |
— | — | — |
’ | ’ | ’ |
‘ | ‘ | ‘ |
“ | “ | “ |
” | ” | ” |
… | … | … |
′ | ′ | ′ |
″ | ″ | ″ |
These 13 18 22 are the only characters I don’t write directly in ASCII. Now to update TextStudio.
While checking the PHP scripts for entities, I swapped lots of " for '. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem worth it.
Added More Entities (27th December 2009)
There are now 18 entries in the table; originally there were 13.
My blog feed build script has needed very ocassionally additions over the past months. I add them only when needed in order to keep the list small. Otherwise there would be hundreds of Replace$() statements in my ConvertEntities() function.