Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle91
Quick question... why would anyone use entities in the first place? Why not just insert the actual unicode character??? Much easier to understand what the entity is if you just read it. And most readers/apps support unicode, don't they?
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You can always type an entity, but the Unicode character may not be easily accessible in your keyboard layout (you could use ALT+code, but then you need to know the code, which is harder, and it doesn't work in all platforms).
Some characters are not visually distinguishable, like &nbps; and space, or m- and n-dash in a monospace font. Some characters are actually the same, like curly apostrophe and curly right single quote (I sometimes use entities for one of them, so I can know which is which if I want to bulk-replace quotes, for example). You may want to explicitly save some accented characters as precomposed and others as accent + base character, with entities you can see the difference, without... the editor may convert one to the other.
But entities are a pain in the arse for regex and searching in general.