“Character Sets "Oops"”

After my last post about switching to UTF-8 for all of our content in Conversant, people wrote to say that my XML feed had problems since we made the change.

Heh. That's ironic.

Anyway, some wrote to me privately, as if a bug is something I'd be embarrassed about. "Oh no! A bug in the software! Say it isn't so!" All this time I thought my software was bug-free, like everybody else's. (What matters is how we deal with them. They're inevitable.)

Well, now the bug should be fixed. All "above ascii" text in the XML output was being automatically converted to numerical entities (like &234;), but that's no longer necessary when the output is UTF-8.

In other words, my “curly quotes” — and long dashes — should all look fine now. Feel free to give me a shout if something looks wrong, though.