gangleri wrote:

with special setups this feature could provide a limited replacement to the
discontinued special page ~makeutf8~

gangleri wrote:

(In reply to comment #0)

This feature would allow to detect BiDi punctuation characters as mentioned in
bug 3819: strip phantom general punctuation characters from page titles

testcase
http://test.leuksman.com/index.php?title=User_talk:Gangleri&oldid=10505&action=edit&section=6

I mentioned this testcase in order to ilustrate how editing of a page could turn
out. There are scenarios I do not like to discuss here in public which would
allow to "acieve this effect" many revisions after the eroneous / malicious
change. This would make it very difficult to trace and correct the error later.
Please e-mail me if you like to know more details.

gangleri wrote:

(In reply to comment #0)
Expanding the request because %nn&nn&nn is another method to encode characters.
see %C3%9C at
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Benutzer:VanGore&action=edit&section=7
[[wikibooks:de:%c3%9Cber_das_Wesen_der_Information]] is an alternative way to encode
[[wikibooks:de:Über_das_Wesen_der_Information]]

Examples:
If you want to distinguish between "minus" = "-" and – – –

"–"

see: Unicode Character EN DASH - U 2013

• http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2013/index.htm

If you want to distinguish between "minus" = "-" and – – –
%E2%80%93 and %e2%80%93 = "–"

*notes*
b) Because of "escape syntax" at some point it should be decided if this feature
would brake documentaion pages with examples. If there all versions –
– – = "–" are used these should not be changed while the page is
edited and saved again.

b) ... If there all versions – – – %E2%80%93 and %e2%80%93 =
"–" are used these should not be changed while the page is edited and saved again.

This feature would "normalise" the way how characters are saved. This would /
should make search more efficient.

add ... It also makes it easier to read and edit / correct text encoded as
%nn%nn/nn .

ui2t5v002 wrote:

Here's my version, in response to Bug 2676:

This is great, but Unicode-unaware *browsers* aren't the only problem. A lot of
people want to work in Unicode-unaware text editors as well, and this makes it
difficult for them. They'd have to fake out the server into thinking they had an
old browser or something in order to see the HTML entity version of the source.
I have a different proposal:

1. Convert all HTML entities (named or Unicode numbers or whatever) into plain

Unicode characters in the wikisource.

2. Provide an option in the editing interface to view the source in either

"plain Unicode" format (with actual characters) or "plain text" format (with HTML
entities) on a per-edit basis.

2.a. When editing in "plain text" mode, all the bad characters (non-ASCII?) will
be converted into named HTML entities if possible (— and the like), or
into numbered HTML entities if not possible (— and the like).

2.b. The default editing format will be selectable in preferences.

gangleri wrote:

*note*
This bug was opened with the summary:
"Add flexible magic character conversion to the built-in editor"

After reading the response from Omegatron in comment 4 and searching for bug
dependencies and duplicates I wonder if the "magic character conversion" should
be limited to "the build-in editor" or should be available for other functions
as well.

changing summary to
"Add flexible magic character conversion to the user interface"
this should cover also the "built-in editor"

adding dependency
blocks: bug 3894: white space characters, BiDi control characters should show up
in diff
having a duplicate: bug 3672: BiDi: improuve the diffs with regard to RTL issues

A feature as requested here would prevent users opening invalid bugs as
(invalid bug 3621: BiDi: RTL list not rendered correctly)

best regards reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]

With the experience of Esperanto magic character conversion, I'm pretty sure we don't want to add any more of that.