Should I use hex ascii accented character code in HTML or use the actual character?

I have several huge CSVs with lots of accented characters in html hex code: é for é and lots of others, even – for –, etc.

My site is a wiki for people to update listings. So when they are presented a textarea for update, the existing content is filled in, and obviously those hex codes will be shown.

Should I be bothered replacing those 开发者_如何学编程codes with actual accented characters, or just leave it as it is? I wrote a script to replace the characters, but somehow the output are weird characters. Probably the format saved in Ruby isn't in UTF-8 format.

By default my site is in UTF-8, and the accented characters are displayed properly with some html coding in the view.

Please advise. Thanks.

Could you clarify what the problem is?

If your data (CSV) is in UTF-8, and the default encoding of your site is UTF-8, then all you would need to do is make sure that when users are editing content, that content is properly treated as UTF-8.

You may not need to display the markup to the users. Perhaps you could leverage a WYSIWIG editor package like TinyMCE?