# Why do I get these weird text strings instead of apostrophes and quotes and such?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [May 20, 2018, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510 "2018-05-20T16:47:00Z")
**Posts on this page:** 8
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2018, 4:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510/1 "2018-05-20T16:47:00Z")
**Alphaboi867** has a thread title which has one of these things in it, meant to be a possessive: “&”
And any time someone quotes Twitter I invariably get “—.
Do I need to update my character set somewhere in Firefox or Windows? [Vista]
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### Author:  [@Northern\_Piper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Northern_Piper)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2018, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510/2 "2018-05-20T16:50:42Z")
I don’t thinks it’s a possessive. I think it’s meant to be an ampersand “&”.
have that same substitution when I type in an ampersand on some of my apps on my iPhone.
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### Author:  [@mixdenny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mixdenny)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2018, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510/3 "2018-05-20T16:50:44Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#):
>
> **Alphaboi867** has a thread title which has one of these things in it, meant to be a possessive: “&”
I see this sometimes on web pages like YouTube where the video title contains an actual ampersand: &
The page with the video will display & instead of the ampersand.
Dennis
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### Author:  [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2018, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510/4 "2018-05-20T17:08:55Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#):
>
> \*\*
> And any time someone quotes Twitter I invariably get “—.
>
> Do I need to update my character set somewhere in Firefox or Windows? [Vista]
For this, you need to tell the application to use Unicode. It probably doesn’t need a new font, just a change in some menu selection. It’ll probably be under “character set” or something similar and the actual selection will be labeled UTF-8.
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### Author:  [@dtilque](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dtilque)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2018, 5:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510/5 "2018-05-20T17:19:29Z")
> [@dtilque](#):
>
> For this, you need to tell the application to use Unicode. It probably doesn’t need a new font, just a change in some menu selection. It’ll probably be under “character set” or something similar and the actual selection will be labeled UTF-8.
If it’s Firefox, the menu selection will be View\>Text Encoding\>Unicode. At least that’s the selection on my version.
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### Author:  [@yabob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/yabob)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2018, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510/6 "2018-05-20T17:28:51Z")
That’s the escape for an ampersand in HTML. Somewhere along the line it got double escaped - some level of software escaped the original ampersand to display it HTML, then another escaped the leading ampersand again. Note that it’s escaped in HTML because the ampersand itself is the escape character. Difficult to prevent this sort of thing in all contexts, while assuring that things that need escaped get escaped.
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### Author:  [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2018, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510/7 "2018-05-20T22:06:40Z")
I think your second example is software not knowing it’s looking at two-byte Unicode and trying to print it one byte at a time as ASCII.
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### Author:  [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)
#### Post date: [May 20, 2018, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-i-get-these-weird-text-strings-instead-of-apostrophes-and-quotes-and-such/814510/8 "2018-05-20T22:49:36Z")
And the weird quotes (or apostrophe) is a similar problem with character sets. Most often, it’s caused because someone didn’t use the standard ASCII " or ’ in their message. Usually they composed their message in some word processing program, which tries to ‘help’ them by replacing the standard ASCII quote with curly opening or closing quotes. But those are extended characters, so they aren’t in the standard ASCII character set. So the internet program has to convert the word processing message between character sets, and that is often difficult.