What ’ means
’ is a broken apostrophe (’): your text was saved as UTF-8 but read as Windows-1252. It's the curly apostrophe, ’, the one in it’s and don’t that word processors put in automatically. Of all the broken sequences it's the one people see most, because almost every English text has apostrophes in it.
Byte by byte
| Byte | In UTF-8 | Windows-1252 shows |
|---|---|---|
| E2 | lead byte: 3 bytes in all | â |
| 80 | continuation byte | € |
| 99 | continuation byte | ™ |
Byte by bytestringmash.com/mojibake/broken-apostrophe
Where you probably saw it
Text pasted from a word processor into a website, an email or a database, where the apostrophes were curly to begin with.
Product descriptions and blog posts after a site moved to a new server or database, when every it’s became it’s at once.
A CSV export opened straight in Excel, which reads it as Windows-1252 unless told otherwise.
Related sequences
Text broken this way rarely has just one problem. “ is a broken opening quote, †is a broken closing quote, — is a broken em dash. The mojibake fixer repairs all of them at once, and its table lists the rest.
Questions
Why does ’ appear instead of an apostrophe?
The apostrophe ’ is three bytes in UTF-8, E2 80 99. Read as Windows-1252, those bytes are â, € and ™.
Can I just replace ’ with an apostrophe?
Yes, find and replace works for this one sequence. The fixer above does it for every sequence at once, and leaves correct text alone.
Will the fixer turn it into a straight apostrophe?
It gives back the curly ’ that was there. Set Curly quotes to Make straight if you want ' instead.
Sources
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