Oops! Where did all the Italian accented characters go?

No time to read this? Why not find something to study instead? A1 – Beginner/Elementary | A2 – Pre-Intermediate | B1 – Intermediate | B2 – Upper-Intermediate | C1 – Advanced | C2 – Proficiency | What’s my level? | Italian level test

+++

Buondì.

Over the past week or so I’ve been tidying up the club website, OnlineItalianClub.com, specifically the grammar exercises, of which there are more than four hundred, the idea being to remove some old advertising code, delete the contents of the page footer – which contained an invalid email address – and so on. Call it very belated spring-cleaning.

I downloaded the web pages, made the corrections, uploaded everything to the server again, and thought no more about it. Until…

Someone emailed to say the accented characters were all missing.

Oops! How did that happen?

Turns out that our pages were written in ANSI, which is a ‘character set’, the purpose of which being that web browsers and other applications know to display, for instance, an accented ‘e’ rather than a normal ‘e’.

Italian has, what, three different ‘e’s? And accents on the other vowels, too. So that’s important.

But the world moved on, leaving ANSI and me behind. The new default ‘character set’ is called UTF-8, apparently, which shouldn’t be a problem necessarily, except that the software I used to modify our webpages assumed they were written in UTF-8, even if they weren’t, so when I came to save my changes, BOOM, DISASTER, all the accented characters disappeared.

To cut a long story short, I spent the weekend fixing everything. The Italian Grammar exercises now hopefully have the necessary accented characters, many thanks to my son Tom (voice of EasyItalianNews.com), who’s studying ‘informatica’ at university so knows how to use Python (not a snake, apparently) to automate making the necessary changes to the encoding of the 400+ .html pages and updating ANSI to UTF-8, for your delight.

Anyway, apologies for the mess up. Do take a look at the Italian Grammar exercises, and do please let me know if you spot anything that still needs fixing. I’m sure there’s plenty.

Alla prossima settimana!

Already used the 33% ebook coupon code? If not, here’s how

Did you know that you can get a 33% coupon code to use on language-learning ebooks purchased from EasyReaders.org?

All you have to do is join their mailing list (for example here: https://easyreaders.org/mailing-list/.)

Students of Italian, Spanish, French, and German who get on the mailing list should be sent the coupon code.

N.b. This promotion is one-use-per-person, so if you’ve already discounted an ebook order with the 33% coupon code, sorry (but there’ll be a 25% Sale promotion soon, in January 2026…)

All that said, looking at the stats for this coupon code, there are many thousands of addresses on the ebooks mailing list but over the years only nine hundred and eighteen people have used the coupon code to save 33% on their ebook purchases.

So I thought I’d send a reminder: join the mailing list here if you’re not already on it.

What’s that you say?? You’re on the ebooks store mailing list, but you don’t remember having been sent or using the coupon code??

Oops.

They’ve had a few changes to their bulk mailing systems over the years – due to privacy legislation and so on – so it is possible that your email address was added to their mailing list without any coupon code being sent out. For instance when downloading a free ebook.

Never mind, let’s fix that right now!

Use the following coupon code to save 33% on your order, with no minimum or maximum spend (but only if you haven’t already done so in the past):

mailing-list-33%-coupon-code

First make your selection from their range of ebooks, which have been especially written to keep you interested and so making progress.

Then go to your shopping cart and carefully paste in the coupon code (it’s mailing-list-33%-coupon-code ), press the ‘Apply coupon’ button and then…

scroll down to verify that the cart total has been reduced BEFORE proceeding with your payment!

Ebooks for students of Italian, Spanish, French, and German can be found on the Catalog page, where everything is organised by language, type, and level.

Browse the Catalog now: Italian | Spanish | French | German

P.S.

And here’s a reminder to read/listen to Tuesday’s bulletin of news from EasyItalianNews.com.

Reading/listening practice will help you consolidate the Italian you’re studying, expand your vocabulary, and build vital comprehension skills.

EasyItalianNews.com is FREE to read/listen to.

Subscribing, and so receiving all three text + audio bulletins of ‘easy’ news via email each week -on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays – is also FREE.

Just enter your email address on this page and click the confirmation link that will be sent to you.

+++

OnlineItalianClub.com | EasyItalianNews.com | Shop (ebooks) | Shop (online lessons)

OnlineFrenchClub.com | OnlineSpanishClub.com | OnlineGermanClub.com