Special Characters Fix?

**mocp2008** · 09-23-2011, 08:14 AM

Hi everyone,

I have a project that required import from HTML source files into Excel. I won't go into the specifics, but the jist is that I have a number of cells that contain text with special characters (in a variety of languages), but are not displayed correctly. For example:

Ã© should be displaying as é
EpÃ*logo should be displaying as Epílogo
etc. etc.

I've got about 9,000 cells in a single column that need to have the characters fixed.

I know I could manually go through and do a find/replace for specific characters, but I'm worried about missing some, and that being a real waste of time.

Any suggestions on the best method to resolve the issue? Thanks so much!

**JBeaucaire** · 09-23-2011, 08:19 AM

If you post up a sample file showing:

1) Sample data in column A
2) A chart in columns G:H that have the search/replace values laid out, all of them...

I can provide a quick macro to do the Mass Replace for you. It will be a tweak on this existing macro:

Mass Replace

**mocp2008** · 09-23-2011, 08:25 AM

Thanks for your reply. Part of the problem is I don't know all of the search/replace values. There's 9,000 cells affected, but I have no idea how many values on each are affected, nor do I have a list of how they should be displayed. They simply follow standard HTML rules, as far as I know...

**JBeaucaire** · 09-23-2011, 08:34 AM

You will have to create a list of your own at some point, of course. It's a pain, but fortunately it's a one-off thing. So, get cracking. Start making your search/replace pairs, there's no shortcut to this, but when you're done, you'll have a list to use over and over again.

**mocp2008** · 09-23-2011, 08:53 AM

Is there a way to create a list of all special characters in a column?

**JBeaucaire** · 09-23-2011, 09:09 AM

The time you're spending looking for a shortcut is wasted time. The number of "special characters" you need to update is not as long as you think. And according to your sample, not single characters anyway. Just make the list in two columns.

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**JBeaucaire** · 09-23-2011, 09:18 AM

These ALT-Codes you're seeing, these are problems with the character sets (fonts) used between the website and your computer. Perhaps if you copied the text from the website into a text editor of some kind first, then into Excel, it might fix some of these for you. Hard to say, there are so many 1000s of fonts out there.