Question

I’m using HTML Tidy Online (http://infohound.net/tidy/) to tidy up some very old and messed up HTML file which contains some Hebrew characters. Whenever the page is processed by Tidy the output turns Hebrew characters into gibberish, even after changing encoding methods in the settings. Using different settings, I do manage to get the same output with the Hebrew characters as unicode entities.
I Googled around for a possible solution but found none.
I had a couple ideas in mind, but I’m not sure exactly how to approach them, if at all (maybe someone has a better solution).

1. I thought maybe I could (after processing the page) scan the page for unicode entities and replace them with the corresponding Hebrew characters (in a systematic way, of course).
2. Maybe I could take the HTML Tidy source code and modify it to output Hebrew characters appropriately. The problem with this is that I doubt I am knowledgeable enough to even get started on something like this.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem. Document in UTF-8, containing unicode characters. HTML Tidy turned them into HTML entities. This in HTMLTIDY.CFG fixed it:

char-encoding: utf8
input-encoding: utf8
output-encoding: utf8

Hope it helps.