What are some common ways that smart quotes will b

Question

Smart quotes cause problems when they are saved in one encoding and then rendered/viewed using a different encoding. What are some ways that smart quotes will appear when rendered incorrectly?

I'm trying to solve the problem where you see an incorrect character encoding and can then say, "Oh, those should be smart quotes."

Answer 1

The most common encoding mixup is probably UTF-8 versus ANSI/Latin1.

The ANSI/Latin1 encoding of “ ‘ ’ ” is [93] [91] [92] [94] hexadecimal. If interpreted as UTF-8, these bytes will most likely be treated as invalid characters and may appear as boxed question marks.

The UTF-8 encoding of “ ‘ ’ ” is [E2 80 9C] [E2 80 98] [E2 80 99] [E2 80 9D] hexadecimal. If interpreted as ANSI/Latin1, these bytes will appear as “ ‘ ’ â€.