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babablablabla's avatar
babablablabla
Explorer | Level 3
7 years ago

Accents in plain txt files incorrectly displayed

I saved some accented and umlauted characters in a plain txt file using mac with UTF-8 encoding under a dropbox folder, and when opening it using dropbox in a browser or on an ios dropbox app, the acccented characters are incorrectly displyed, i.e. ignroed or replaced with something wierd. Conversely when I saved a plain txt file with accents using ios dropbox app, the plain text file opens in Mac Textedit with incorrect accents. Is there a way to set the plain text file so that accents and umlauts are interepreted correctly on both my Mac and dropbox app/online viewing through a browser? 

  • Jane's avatar
    Jane
    Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff
    Hey babablablabla, as this matter will need some hands-on troubleshooting (& because it may need to be further reviewed by a specialized team member), I’ve made sure to reach out to you directly via email on my end. Whenever you have some spare time, please have a look at your inbox for my email & we’ll take it from there. 
     
    I’ll be awaiting your next message in order to best address your question & thanks for reaching out for assistance on our Community! 

     

  • DiversityStudio's avatar
    DiversityStudio
    Explorer | Level 3

    I too am having the same issue, it was a file in plain text .txt format with passwords which broke because special characters were being changed to HTML entities like & into &amp; and < into &lt;

    Dropbox can you advise has this been fixed?

    • Walter's avatar
      Walter
      Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

      Hi DiversityStudio; welcome to the Community.

      Just to make sure we're troubleshooting the right thing here, could you elaborate on the issue you described providing screenshots of how the mentioned file looks like on our website and how it looks like when downloaded and opened locally on your device(s)?

      Thanks a bunch!

      • DiversityStudio's avatar
        DiversityStudio
        Explorer | Level 3

        Hi Walter,

         

        Yes I can elaborate, we created some plain text files .txt for passwords and when viewed on phone app or local desktop the special characters are correct but when viewed on a web browsers some characters are being rendered as their HTML entities for instance & as &amp; and > as &gt; which when we copy the password to be used to login somewhere it is wrong because of the changed characters

        Screenshot on desktop/app all OK

        Screenshot 2020-03-06 at 11.58.11.png

        Screenshot on Dropbox in web browser

        Screenshot 2020-03-06 at 11.59.02.png

        Notice &amp; and not just &

        Also looking at the source HTML it has been changed to HTML entities, does this help you to shed some light? I was hoping plain text files should not be formatted and just outputted as plain text only.

        Also this was OK for weeks as I have been copying from a web browser view and it was only yesterday this happened.

         

        Screenshot 2020-03-06 at 12.00.07.png

         

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