Copy + Paste Chinese From Website

Question

I am re-branding a website that has both English & Chinese Traditional text. When I am copying + pasting the Chinese text into notepad++, the characters gets displayed as question marks. I tried changing the language settings within notepad++ to Chinese, but it now displays as squashed rectangles. I also changed my keyboard language setting in Windows 7 to Chinese but it did not work.

This is what I see when I right-click in Chrome to copy the Chinese character:

Solution 1

This thread seemed to at least damper my problem:

How to display chinese characters on Notepad?

Apparently, even though Notepad++ is storing the characters correctly, they are not being displayed correctly.

You can use one of the newly supported fonts (ver.6) under Settings > Style Configurator > Font Style > Font Name , the ones at the top, that support Chinese character display. So long as the file is encoded UTF-8, it will display correctly either way, you just may have to see squares instead of the actual characters when editing.

Solution 2

Since you are using Notepad++, be sure to set the Encoding to UTF-8 when dealing with non-ANSI characters (e.g. Chinese).

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Also, you can verify the encoding of the page you are working with, and set Notepad++'s encoding to match. If you are using Firefox, the encoding can be found in the Page Info popup accessed by clicking the webpage's favicon.

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If changing the encoding does not resolve the issue, it may be that Notepad++ is using a font that does not support all characters for that encoding. Change the font by going to Settings > Style Configurator and setting the Global Font to a Unicode or proper typeface. (I use DejaVu Sans Mono.)

Solution 3

Chinese text can be copy/pasted normally in Windows 7. It sounds to me like you're using a program that isn't Unicode-aware. As an experiment I opened up a text file (using plain old Notepad) that contains Chinese in Windows 7, copied a line and pasted it into this message which is inside a virtual machine running XP with the east Asian fonts installed. It worked.

Comments

[RCNeil]

I would love to know if this got solved. I'm copying/pasting Chinese characters from a Word document into Notepad++, and Notepad++ is the only one that renders the characters incorrectly. My browser, other text editors, etc, all work fine, and YES Global Font and UTF-8 without BOM is selected in Notepad++

[Ramhound]

@icu222much - This confirms Loren's theory.

[icu222much]

I looked at the encoding of the source and it is Big5.

[iglvzx]

Which font are you using in Notepad++? See my updated answer.

[icu222much]

My settings are the same as yours except I did not have 'enable global font' checked. With your settings, I now get a question mark instead of a squashed square. Could there be a problem with my browser as I only see squares under the copy selector (see my updated question).

[JP Hellemons]

Moving coding from ansi to utf-8 in notepad++ solved it for me, thanks!