Remove jumbled text (Ampersand and similar)

Jenslyn87

Hi all,

Quick question. I have a bunch of games with metadata in xml files like I think does everyone. When I access these xml files with notepad, you get this jumble whenever there's and ampersand (&), and I think with certain other signs. It might look like this:

"Prove your skill by earning Badges &amp ; gaining access to Battle Frontier ? the front line of PokÃ©mon battling that..."

(I put the space in between "amp" and ";" above; otherwise the post would format the string into and ampersand by itself - which is precisely what I'd like to see happen on my Pi!)

When I access the same files through my browser, the ampersand shows up just fine. Because I get the jumble on my Pi, I figure it's using something like notepad to read the files. Is there any way to make it use another program so that I don't get the jumbled text? I'd love that.

Thanks!

mediamogul

@jenslyn87 said in Remove jumbled text (Ampersand and similar):

When I access these xml files with notepad, you get this jumble

It's likely a problem with character encoding in Notepad. If you're unable to choose unicode or utf-8 in the Notepad settings, try using Notepad++ instead.

Jenslyn87

@mediamogul Thank you for helping! Is there a way of changing which reader my Pi uses to access the file so that I can choose to have it use unicode, utf-8 or Notepadd++ instead, like you say? This is easy enough on the PC, but I haven't seen any option like that on the Pi?

mediamogul

@jenslyn87

The various Pi text readers shouldn't need to be set outside of their defaults for this as far as I know. It's likely that the file's were opened in Notepad, where the erroneous symbols were then added and saved, leading the Pi (and anything else) to naturally read and utilize them. I'm afraid I don't know of a way to revert the files to their original condition after the symbols have been added. Hopefully someone else might.

Jenslyn87

@mediamogul Okay, back with a complete solution!

I downloaded Notepadd++ and installed the HTMLTag plugin. Then, with the gameslist file open in Notepadd++, I marked all text (ctrl+A) and decoded them (ctrl+shift+e). I noticed that some text bits had several layers of coding, so I pushed ctrl+shift+e a few times to make sure they were completely decoded. I did that in all gameslist files, and that completely fixed my issue. What's more, I think it may have made my boot / Emu Restart a bit faster. Could be wrong, but it certainly feels like it. Perhaps decoding the lists takes the Pi a bit of time?

Thank you for your help - great to get this problem solved. Looks way better now!

mediamogul

@jenslyn87

Very nice!