[capidamonte]

It should, of course, be optional -- and consistent, no mixing. Often, in the past, I have had the impression that Sigil is abstracting extended characters somehow, which helped make regex unstable.

I prefer the named entities, myself -- I like to easily distinguish between ' and ‘/’, for instance, or hyphen-–-—, •-·, etc. Of course, there are characters, but visually difficult. Regex is no more difficult for these than for characters; don't have to open Character Map or type ALT-NUMPAD codes, so it might be easier.

I guess my take is that, for me, if it's not on the keyboard, it should be an entity. And there are even a few on the keyboard that make life easier for me. (>, <, ', ˜, & # 96 ; ,[forum is eating the numeric entity for the grave accent (backtick)! which has no named entity, sadly], etc.)

This comes in large part from dealing with badly-formed source files, and slowly working via regex to get them consistent throughout. The named entities are emphatically expressive of content, not leaving it up to visual interpretation on my part.

Also, generally, the ereaders have a method of expressing most entities -- but the characters are more problematic, leading to ugly replacements or errors.

My 2 ¢

Aloha,