Why are apostrophes -- or is it hyphens -- in some posts suddenly showing up as a scrambled mess ??

[eppur_se_muova]

I posted this to GD, but maybe it's more appropriate here.

Recently, I have seen a lot of posts containing a nonsense string of characters. At first I thought it always replaced apostrophes, but now it seems I am seeing it in places where dashes/hyphens seem to be intended.

Given that the Great Election Night Hack involved some strange chicanery with superscripts or something like that, I'm a little concerned that this might be something that adversely affects DU. It just suddenly started a few days ago, and I can't recall changing any of my settings or anything (I *could* be wrong about that, obviously, given how most software suffers from auto-upgrade-incontinence these days). Strangest of all, the string seems to have reproduced itself in triplicate in my original post, which strikes me as worrying.

Here's the thread from GD: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221067937

[Tasmanian Devil]

1. I don't know, but ...

‘Peace president’ has unicode open/close quotes around the Peace President text. They display as single characters but are encoded as 3 bytes (each). It displays fine in my browser (Safari). Idk why it would not display correctly for you.

[EarlG]

2. It's nothing nefarious

If you copy and paste from an article which is using curly quotes, or some other special character, and for some reason there's an encoding issue, the character will show up as a weird glyph.

It might be possible to fix at your end (see this article), but it might be a DU issue. Either way, it's nothing to worry about from a security perspective.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Thanks ! It started rather suddenly, so that provoked my suspicions. I guess repeated copy/paste just ...

makes things worse.