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Forum Discussion
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 ac...
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 & and < into <
Dropbox can you advise has this been fixed?
- Walter
Dropbox 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!
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 & and > as > 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 on Dropbox in web browser
Notice & 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.
- Walter
I see now, thanks for your swift response and extensive description DiversityStudio; it definitely helps paint a better picture of the matter at hand.
For the time being, as we work on this, I'd recommend downloading the file and access it locally to copy the text you need. I know it's not optimal, but it should do the trick for now.
Moving on to your concern, it seems like there's an issue with how the text is encoded when previewed on our website (assuming the wrong encoding). Can you let me know for how long has this been working fine and what browsers you've tested it on?
While at it, does it persist after clearing your browser's cache and/on or an incognito window with no extension or plugin running and can you replicate it with new files following the same procedure?
Let me know what you find and we'll take it from there!
