this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Why is it that whenever something is spitting out junk data, those specific characters are involved?
� is used to represent an invalid character, so it makes sense that it'd appear often when bad data is being rendered (or good data is being rendered improperly).
Everything is 0s and 1s to a computer. What a pattern of 0s and 1s encodes is decided by people--often arbitrarily. Over the years there have been attempts to standardize encodings but, for legacy reasons, older encodings are still valid.
The 0s and 1s that encode ' in UTF-8 (a standardized encoding) are the same 0s and 1s that encode ’ in CP-1252 (a legacy encoding).
The � symbol is shown when the 0s and 1s don't encode anything of meaning.
’=e2 80 99(3 bytes)’=e28099(3 separate bytes)Good to see it "spelt out" like that
Right single quote (’) in UTF-8 (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+2019) has the same bytes as ’ in cp1252 (which is more or less "ASCII" if we're doing ELI5). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252
Sometimes your keyboard or program's settings will use right single quote for apostrophes instead of a normal apostrophe. ' you might notice how this one is straight and not bent a certain way. This setting is often called smart quotes.