What “ means
“ is a broken opening quote (“): your text was saved as UTF-8 but read as Windows-1252. It's the opening curly quote, “, which starts a quotation. Its partner, the closing quote, usually comes out as †followed by an invisible character, so quoted text often shows “ at one end and †at the other.
Byte by byte
| Byte | In UTF-8 | Windows-1252 shows |
|---|---|---|
| E2 | lead byte: 3 bytes in all | â |
| 80 | continuation byte | € |
| 9C | continuation byte | œ |
Byte by bytestringmash.com/mojibake/broken-left-quote
Where you probably saw it
Quotations in articles and reviews that were written in a word processor and then pasted or imported into a website.
Email newsletters that were written in one program and sent through another with a different character set.
Data moved between databases where the old one stored text as Latin-1 and the new one expects UTF-8.
Related sequences
Text broken this way rarely has just one problem. †is a broken closing quote, ’ is a broken apostrophe, … is a broken ellipsis. The mojibake fixer repairs all of them at once, and its table lists the rest.
Questions
What is “?
A broken opening quote. The UTF-8 bytes of “, E2 80 9C, were read as Windows-1252, which shows them as â, € and œ.
Why is the closing quote different?
” is E2 80 9D. Windows-1252 has no character for 9D, so it shows as an invisible control or disappears, leaving †behind.
Does the fixer handle both quotes?
Yes. Paste the whole passage and both ends come back.
Sources
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