Editing Help:Text editor support (section)

==Dealing with special characters==

Wikipedia encodes text using the [[UTF-8]] character set, which allows using many non-English characters and special symbols. Such characters may appear even in articles where you wouldn't expect them due to the use of interwiki links to non-English versions of the article. Therefore, using an editor that does not mangle these characters or replace them with question marks is very important. Check your editor's documentation to make sure that it supports Unicode or UTF-8, and enable it if needed. You don't necessarily need a special editor; recent versions of [[Notepad (Windows)|Notepad]] and [[Microsoft Office Word|Microsoft Word]] support Unicode, for example. An extensive list of Unicode-supporting editors is available for [http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors.html Windows] and [http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities.html other operating systems] (see also: [[Comparison of text editors]]).

If your editor does not support UTF-8, then copy-paste from web browser may mangle the characters. For example, pasting from Windows Clipboard automatically converts characters to whatever character set your editor uses and replace any characters not included in this character set with question marks. You can avoid this by using one of the helper applications or browser plugins mentioned above. For example, ''It's All Text!'' does not mangle any characters.

When editing an article with special characters using a new editor, using the "Show changes" button (next to "Show preview") to see exactly what your edit will change is a good idea. If areas with special characters that you didn't intend to modify are highlighted as red, that means they will be corrupted, even though both versions may look the same to you because you don't have foreign fonts installed.

[http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html BabelPad] is a free editor for Windows with special support for dealing with Unicode, and is ideal if you need to determine which of several similar-looking characters an article is using, or deal with hard-to-edit Unicode control codes (like for multidirectional text).