Conversion of special characters

What is your environment? Is it the "bare" CKEditor, or the ASP.NET integration? What versions do you use?

Was this ever solved? We desperately want CKEditor to NOT replace instances of ampersands ('&') with & As previously noted, setting "entities : false" doesn't work (and causes other problems). Is there any way to get CKEditor to leave the ampersands alone?

Usually you don't need to change the entities configuration and instead just set forceSimpleAmpersand = true
If you are talking about & in the contents, then those must be encoded or "bad things will happen"

alfonsoml wrote:Usually you don't need to change the entities configuration and instead just set forceSimpleAmpersand = true
If you are talking about & in the contents, then those must be encoded or "bad things will happen"

Sadly, the standard response to my question (which has been posed by many others) seems to be "don't do that, it's not valid HTML." Unfortunately, there are cases where special characters must not be encoded. We are interacting with a web app that uses tokens wrapped in 3 ampersands, e.g. &&&sometoken&&&. These tokens are replaced by valid html -- except that CKEditor breaks things by replacing the above example with &&&sometoken&&&

TinyMCE happily lets us disable the automatic replacement of ampersands. We're simply trying to figure out how to get CKEditor to do the same. I my 25 years of experience with software, I've never seen a case where software that thinks it knows better than the user has worked out well. Remember the Airbus that crashed because the fly-by-wire software decided that "bad things will happen" if the pilot decided to not land?

Did you try the protectedSource option?

There is no magic solution that will work for everyone.

If you want to use always & instead of & then you just have to do a replace() on the returned data. It's even safer in your case, data.replace("&&&", "&&&"), that's safe and you won't have problems. You don't require any special API, configuration or anything.

In general terms, the browser might be the one encoding &, or you can get unexpected dataloss if the user types > in design view and instead of it being saved as > it's saved as > (etc...) I know that in general people isn't interested in reading previous explanations about why some thing work the way they do, and it's funnier to blame just on CKEditor instead of putting an extra line of code in your part

Thanks for the reply. I'd love to try your suggestion, but it's unclear where or how I call data.replace. I've been combing the documentation for reference to a callback function to no avail. I tried using jquery to capture the setData event, but if I attempt to get the content (i.e..val() ) and replace all instances of & with &, then I end up in an infinite loop since setting the revised content triggers the setData event. Any help would be appreciated.

As a side note, I did discover if I set the following values in the configuration, the ampersands are left alone:
basicEntities : false,
entities : false,
forceSimpleAmpersand : true,
All three must be set this way for this to work Not sure what, if any, side effects there might be...

alfonsoml wrote:Usually you don't need to change the entities configuration and instead just set forceSimpleAmpersand = true
If you are talking about & in the contents, then those must be encoded or "bad things will happen"

Actually, if your are using CKeditor for mailforms "bad things will happen" if the & is encoded, since special characters won't be decoded.