What's with this ' replacing the '

[michaelsteele3]

All over the internet, whenever I look at something posted a while ago that had a ' (apostrophe) in it, it's converted to '

For example, in one of Harvestr's older posts,

I've been

Anyone else notice this?

[Vanamonde]

I've seen this as an Imgur-specific glitch in post captions, but nowhere else.

[sal_vager]

Old posts have that, we used to be on simple machines forum software, and with the change to vBulletin as well as various other changes over the years broke the old formatting

[Fel]

' = \x39

It's XML thingy I forget, just like you cannot have & laying around as text so it becomes &

[Wolf Baginski]

It's one of those things that can make things appear complicated, but the root causes are simple enough.

There have always been characters that can't be used for some jobs. Things such as filenames and HTML code have special meanings for some characters. And there are ways of sending those characters so the special meanings aren't applied.

The apostrophe has always been represented by the numeric value of 39, since the days of ASCII. Of course the computer handles it in binary, but 39 is the decimal equivalent. It's just that, unless the computer is doing something special, that 39 in the file pops onto your screen as an apostrophe. And those odd-looking strings are a standard way of saying "show the character for which this is the code".

Sometimes that gets mistaken.

Anyway, if your browser shows the URL of the page you're reading, this page's URL will show a different way of encoding the odd characters, but that last code isn't decimal. It's the same idea.

I can't fix it for you, but either something needs changing on your browser, or something has been lost from the file. It sometimes happens when the computer is set up for a different language to US English. If I saw the sort of error you report, I'd want to check my language setting.

It might have some other cause. It's just somewhere obvious to check.

My browser does have settings for the language it uses. The default is what the OS uses, which affects the display, the spelling-checks, and the keyboard. I know it can get complicated if you use a different language, or more than one language.

What I have just works. I don't see the weirdness. May it will go away as mysteriously as it appeared.