What — means
— is a broken em dash (—): your text was saved as UTF-8 but read as Windows-1252. It's the em dash, the long dash used to set off part of a sentence. Its UTF-8 bytes are E2 80 94, and Windows-1252 shows 94 as ”, so a broken em dash looks like a quote mark tacked onto â€.
Byte by byte
| Byte | In UTF-8 | Windows-1252 shows |
|---|---|---|
| E2 | lead byte: 3 bytes in all | â |
| 80 | continuation byte | € |
| 94 | continuation byte | ” |
Byte by bytestringmash.com/mojibake/broken-em-dash
Where you probably saw it
Articles and documents typed in a word processor, which turns two hyphens into an em dash as you type.
Web pages whose server sends no character set, or the wrong one, so the browser guesses Windows-1252.
Text that went through an old system or plugin that assumed Latin-1.
Related sequences
Text broken this way rarely has just one problem. – is a broken en dash, … is a broken ellipsis, ’ is a broken apostrophe. The mojibake fixer repairs all of them at once, and its table lists the rest.
Questions
What is —?
A broken em dash. The em dash is E2 80 94 in UTF-8, and Windows-1252 shows those bytes as â, € and ”.
How is it different from –?
– is a broken en dash, –. The last byte is 93 instead of 94.
Will fixing it change my hyphens?
No. Ordinary hyphens are plain ASCII and are never touched.
Sources
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