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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T13:56:02+00:00

I found a website that contains the string don’t. The obvious intent was the

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I found a website that contains the string “don’t”. The obvious intent was the word “don’t”. I looked at the source expecting to see some character references, but didn’t (it just shows the literal string “don’t”. A Google search yielded nothing (expect lots of other sites that have the same problem!). Can anyone explain what’s happening here?

Edit: Here’s the meta tag that was used:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

Would this not cause the page to be served up as Latin-1 in the HTTP header?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In your browser, switch the page encoding to “UTF-8”. You’re seeing a right single quote character, which is encoded by the octets 0xE2 0x80 0x99 in UTF-8. In your charset, windows-1252, those 3 octets render as “’”. The page should be explicitly specifying UTF-8 as its charset either in the HTTP headers or in an HTML <meta> tag, but it probably isn’t.

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