Anyway

This goes into the ‘saves time’ cat­egory and is slightly too long to fit into 140 characters.

If you’re using XSLT on some XML file that has had a mis­cel­laneous his­tory and you see the error Illegal HTML character: decimal 146 (or some­thing sim­il­ar), don’t pan­ic or break out your hex view­er to try to find the ran­dom char­ac­ter that’s caus­ing the problem.

Get jEd­it instead. Open the file in jEd­it, and go to the menu Util­it­ies -> Buf­fer Options. In the char­ac­ter encod­ing drop-down, choose Win­dows-1252. The error message(s) will point you right at the offend­ing character(s). For added fun, repeat with ISO-8859–1 to flush out oth­er odd char­ac­ters that aren’t illeg­al, but may not show up cor­rectly depend­ing on your down-stream pro­cessing (lig­at­ures, etc.). Then switch back to UTF‑8 or whatever you need, save, and you’re done!

JEd­it also has decent XML fea­tures if you install the plu­gins, an added bonus.