I have a component with a rich text field. In the Source tab I type ÷ then switch to the Design tab and the character displays correctly. I then switch to the Source tab and the ÷ statement has been replaced by the actual character.
What can i do to stop this happening?
This is valid behaviour and I suspect that you could not restrict it out-of-the-box unless you write a Filtering XSLT to handle your specific special scenario.
The obilus (or divison sign or the ÷ symbol) is a part of ISO-8859-1 character set which is default character set on any browser and you can directly use these symbols in your HTML code in addition to using their character set.
You will get this expected behaviour (as the one defined for divison sign in your question) for other character of this character set as well like - © ¥ £ etc.
You can get the complete list of these character set HERE
÷in the source tab? But seriously: can you explain what your problem is? Why do you want this not to happen? – Dominic Cronin♦ Jun 11 '13 at 21:05