Solved: Why Do I Get Odd Characters instead of Quotes in My Documents’s?

[chuckiechan]

Why Do I Get Odd Characters instead of Quotes in My Documents? - Ask Leo!

tl;dr:

An example is this word: yesterday’s Where the characters ’ should clearly be an apostrophe.

Each, of course has a different encoding. Let’s take the right single quote (for reasons I’ll explain below):

ASCII: doesn’t exist
ISO-8859-1: 0xB4 in hexadecimal
Unicode: 0x07E3 in hexadecimal
UTF-8: 0xE28099

I don’t expect you to care about the actual numbers there, but simply notice how dramatically different they are.

Now, what happens when the UTF-8 series of numbers is interpreted as if it were ISO-8859-1?

’

Look familiar?

0xE28099 breaks down as 0xE2 (â), 0x80 (€) and 0x99 (™). What was one character in UTF-8 (’) gets mistakenly displayed as three (’) when misinterpreted as ISO-8859-1.

So there we have it.
BTW: I don't recall seeing it in the new xenForo site I'm involved in, so maybe it will be gone with the upcoming change.