What †means
†is a broken closing quote (”): your text was saved as UTF-8 but read as Windows-1252. It's the closing curly quote, ”. Its last UTF-8 byte, 9D, has no character in Windows-1252, so what you see is †followed by an invisible control character, or just †if something along the way removed it.
Byte by byte
| Byte | In UTF-8 | Windows-1252 shows |
|---|---|---|
| E2 | lead byte: 3 bytes in all | â |
| 80 | continuation byte | € |
| 9D | continuation byte | [U+009D] |
Byte by bytestringmash.com/mojibake/broken-right-quote
Where you probably saw it
The end of quotations in text that also shows “ at the start of them.
Text where the invisible character was stripped out, which leaves †on its own. The fixer can't rebuild a byte that's gone; if †is all that's left, replace it with ” by hand.
Spreadsheets and CSV files with quoted product names or comments.
Related sequences
Text broken this way rarely has just one problem. “ is a broken opening quote, ’ is a broken apostrophe, — is a broken em dash. The mojibake fixer repairs all of them at once, and its table lists the rest.
Questions
Why does the closing quote show as †with nothing after it?
Its third byte, 9D, has no character in Windows-1252. Browsers show it as an invisible control, U+009D, and some programs delete it.
Can the fixer repair †on its own?
Only while the invisible character is still there. If it was deleted, the information is gone, and a find and replace of †with ” is the fix.
How do I see the invisible character?
Paste the text above. The working names it as U+009D.
Sources
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