Gotcha – How to Use Special Characters in Magento Emails

I came across an annoying problem when adding some “Widerrufsbelehrung” text (Right of Withdrawal) text to the end of the New Order sales email in Magento. This is required text to comply with German E-commerce regulations, but the problem is that Magento can’t parse the special characters in this text.

I came across a simple but effective online tool for converting special characters to Unicode, at http://pinyin.info/tools/converter/chars2uninumbers.html. Simply copy and paste your completed HTML (containing your special characters) and you can easily convert it to Unicode for pasting back into your locale files.

Hope that helps some poor web developer who is up all night trying to get Magento emails to work.