There are times when you are looking for a solution of a problem and nothing seems to help… until you realize that you missed something very stupid.

This happened to me today: I’m playing around a bit with ckeditor and of course, I wanted it to play nice with languages like Hebrew and Greek (for those wondering: I study Theology).

So I tried to have some Hebrew letters as initial values, and what I got looked like this:

This does not look very Hebrew

When I clicked on „Quellcode“ which is German for „source code“ I saw what I learned is called html entities, 4 or 5 character sets that all started with &. So the Hebrew I entered in the source file as initial value got lost and „translated“ into those html entities. I asked google and came to settings like

config.entities = false;

and

config.htmlEncodeOutput = false;

but they didn’t change a thing. But the solution was rather simple as you can see here:

One should use the propper encoding to start with

Things bettered a lot after correcting this:

Once uft-8 was chosen, the Hebrew text appeared

All of a sudden, the Hebrew text was actually Hebrew and readable. Stupid mistake, took a bit to find out. So if ever you run into a similar situation, be sure to tell your website which encoding you use like so:

`<meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />`

and be sure to set the encoding accordingly if you do not use utf-8 like I did.