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Text Formatting

ExpressionEngine has a number of text formatting options that enable you to control how text is rendered within your weblog entries and comments.

Auto XHTML

The purpose of the Auto XHTML option is to make your content semantically and typographically correct. This feature does the following:

Double Line Breaks are wrapped in paragraph tags: <p>content..</p>
Single Line Breaks are turned into <br /> tags.
Double quotes are converted to curly double quotes: "this" becomes “this”
Single quotes are converted to curly single quotes: Joe's becomes Joe’s
Double dashes are converted to em-dashes: This -- text becomes this—text.
Three periods are converted to ellipsis: This... becomes this…

In addition, the Auto XHTML feature intelligently handles text containing block level elements, like <div>, <blockquote>, etc. so that they are not wrapped in paragraph tags. Further, elements within <pre> tags are exempt from the paragraph conversion.

The Auto XHTML Feature can be found in the PUBLISH page of the Control Panel. You'll see a menu below each entry field with this option. You can also configure your Comment Preferences so that any comments will be formatted this way.

Note: By default, all entries and comments are assigned to this formatting option.

Auto BR

This Auto BR feature simply converts each line break into an HTML <br /> tag.

This feature can be found in the PUBLISH page of the Control Panel. Youll see a menu below each entry field with this option. You can also configure your Comment Preferences so that any comments will be formatted this way.

Convert High ASCII to Entities

Due to the inherent limitations of the web only Low-ASCII characters can be shown reliably in web browsers. Low-ASCII values are the basic characters, numbers, and standard punctuation on your computer keyboard.

If your text contains High-ASCII values, like accented characters, or if you copy your text from Microsoft Word, which uses High-ASCII values for quotes and other characters, then you run the risk that some characters will not be displayed correctly on your web pages.

Furthermore, depending on a number of factors related to your server's character encoding support, when you submit High-ASCII values into your database they might not be recognized properly for storage.

ExpressionEngine's Convert High ASCII to Entities feature will automatically convert these high-ASCII characters into their appropriate HTML character entity so that any web browser can display them correctly. For instance, the © character will be converted into its HTML entity (©), which any web browser, regardless of its character encoding, will correctly display as a copyright symbol.

To enable this feature go to the following page in your Control Panel:

Admin > Weblog Management > Global Weblog Preferences

Once enabled, whenever you submit new entries they will be processed.

Note: The conversion happens when you submit entries, not at run time, so you'll need to edit/re-save any entries containing High-ASCII values for this feature to work.