I totally second this request! At least jEdit could give a simple warning (and maybe a dialog with options what to do) if the chosen character encoding doesn't support some symbols.

For example, right now if you:
1. create file in ISO-8859-1
2. insert there 'abc©®def'
2. convert the character encoding to something else ... lets say ISO-8859-4
3. save the file

result: It just brutally converts every symbol that the target character encoding doesn't have (right now © and ®) to question marks '?' without any warning or notice, so in the result file you have 'abc??def'. Even plain windows notepad.exe behaves better!

expected result: jEdit opens a dialog with warning that some characters doesn't exist in the target encoding. It also gives options what to do:
1. Replace those symbols with ? marks (same as current action)
2. Convert those symbols in question to html entities! (specially it should be default option if you are saving html, xhtml or xml files)
3. Replace with [ ] (text input field)
4. Option to change the file into another encoding (that supports those symbols - similiar to notepad.exe behaviour)

NB! I don't want it to be separate plug-in, but jEdit's default behaviour when saving files and/or converting character encoding

Hi,

did you try the buffer options?

Utilities -> Buffer Options -> Character encoding

HTML is not a character encoding. But you can set the "Edit mode" in the same dialog f.e. to use syntax highlighting.

I have no big experiences with encodings but I hope it helps.

Lars