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– is a broken en dash

Your text was saved as UTF-8 and read as Windows-1252. Paste it below and it's put right.

39 characters
Updates as you type
Correct text is left as it is

Show the steps
  1. Each garbled run was turned back into the bytes Windows-1252 showed, then read as UTF-8, as it should have been.
  2. – → – (U+2013): bytes E2 80 93
Printable chart

What – means

– is a broken en dash (–): your text was saved as UTF-8 but read as Windows-1252. It's the en dash, –, the short dash used in ranges like 9–5 and Monday–Friday. Its UTF-8 bytes are E2 80 93, which Windows-1252 shows as â, € and “.

WHY IT HAPPENS

Byte by byte

– (U+2013) in UTF-8, and what Windows-1252 makes of each byte
ByteIn UTF-8Windows-1252 shows
E2lead byte: 3 bytes in allâ
80continuation byte€
93continuation byte“

Byte by bytestringmash.com/mojibake/broken-en-dash

Where you probably saw it

Opening hours, date ranges and page ranges, which use en dashes.

Spreadsheets of prices or dates exported as CSV and opened in Excel.

Titles and headings, where some styles use a spaced en dash in place of a colon.

Related sequences

Text broken this way rarely has just one problem. — is a broken em 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 en dash. The en dash – is E2 80 93 in UTF-8; read as Windows-1252, those bytes are â, € and “.

Why does a quote mark appear in a broken dash?

Byte 93 is “ in Windows-1252. The same byte is the last byte of the en dash in UTF-8.

Does the fixer turn en dashes into hyphens?

No. It restores the en dash that was there.

Sources

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