What is this: ’ ? Anyone know?

Question

I realize its some sort of glitch in a program, but does anyone out there know EXACTLY what it stands for? And, how do you get it? It is trademarked, so it must mean something.

Answer 1

It's not a glitch.  That comes from Word documents for special characters.  It may show up when you copy/paste a web site into Word and then save it as an HTML document.  If the site has odd characters, Word subs its own.  In most cases, Word just uses what it thinks it needs to use depending on the character encoding.

Ron  

Answer 2

It's the UTF-8 character ’  (a right single quote or apostrophe, but not the simplified ASCII version) displayed without UTF-8 support as ’.  Someone probably tried to use a word processor as a text editor and pasted non-ASCII text into a form that was expecting ASCII.  It's the dumbing down of the Internet.

A properly designed web page will have a meta tag for content-type which defines it as text/html; charset=UTF-8.  Amazingly enough, Yahoo! has this:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">