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Converting characters to HTML entities
The old way
So we have to enter some Spanish in the language files of our CMS. That ó needs to be converted to an entity. We copy the special character and open our dashboard:
We paste the character and hit enter:
The HTML entities dashboard widget neatly tells us the correct entity is ó. We click it and paste the entity in our code.
The HTML entities widget can be downloaded at Leftlogic. At the same page you can also do the same thing online. This is a pretty easy way to convert characters to HTML entitities. But it’s a bit on the slow side.
The new way (requires Textmate)
The new way is so much better. Select the entity in Textmate:
Hit COMMAND+& and this menu comes up:
Hit your “1″ key and voila: entity ready and you’re still in the same application, so you can continue your work smoothly.
(This screenshot way kind of sucks, maybe I should try to do a screencast next time?)
Handy Textmate tip. Thanks. Two small comments:
If your site uses UTF-8 encoding, you don’t need to use HTML entities.
December 18th, 2007 at 12:25 ∞The right shortcut isn’t SHIFT+COMMAND+& but COMMAND+&.
Correctomundo. Fixed in the post.
December 18th, 2007 at 12:34 ∞OT
What CMS do you use? Or does your company have a custom CMS?
I ask because I am looking into several CMS systems, trying to figure out what the good choices are. I recently developed a site in Drupal which was a lot of fun.
December 18th, 2007 at 2:40 ∞We use our own CMS ( Fork CMS).
December 18th, 2007 at 2:44 ∞Screencasts often are a more suitable way to demonstrate this kind of thing indeed. Shame there is no free lightweight screen recording application for the Mac.
December 19th, 2007 at 9:47 ∞It’s also a bitch to work at 800×600 for the purpose of a screencast…:)
December 19th, 2007 at 9:51 ∞Most screen capture tools let you define a custom sized canvas to record :)
December 19th, 2007 at 2:01 ∞That’s a nice feature … !
December 19th, 2007 at 6:56 ∞Smultron could learn from Textmate :-).