Mojibuster

’ instead of an apostrophe: fix broken quotes and dashes

Your text shows it’s instead of it’s, “ instead of a quotation mark or – instead of a dash? These typographic characters take three bytes in UTF-8. Mojibuster puts them back together – paste the text above.

Works with text and these files:

  • CSV
  • TXT
  • JSON
  • XML
  • SRT
  • VTT
  • TSV
  • MD
  • HTML
  • SQL
  • LOG

For example Excel exports, database dumps, subtitles or website code.

Repair

  1. Drop a file or paste text
  2. It gets repaired automatically
  3. Copy or download
or simply drag a file here

Why these characters in particular?

Word, Outlook, WordPress and many other programs replace straight quotes and hyphens with typographic ones as you type: ’, “, ”, – and …. In UTF-8 these characters live in the range E2 80 xx and take three bytes. Read as Windows-1252, they always become †plus a third character. Accented letters take only two bytes and show up as é – more on that.

A newsletter sentence shown as Windows-1252

Before

Don’t miss our ‘summer’ sale – up to 30 % off… it’s on now!

After

Don’t miss our ‘summer’ sale – up to 30 % off… it’s on now!

The patterns at a glance

  • ’ → ’ (apostrophe, closing single quote)
  • ‘ → ‘ (opening single quote)
  • “ → “ (opening double quote)
  • †plus an invisible character → ” (closing double quote, see below)
  • – → – (en dash), — → — (em dash)
  • … → … (ellipsis), • → • (bullet)
  • € → €, £ → £

Special case: †followed by nothing

The closing quote ” contains the byte 9D, which has no character in Windows-1252. Many programs simply drop it when displaying the text, leaving †with an invisible character or nothing at all. If the byte is still there, Mojibuster repairs it. If it was already removed while copying, it’s no longer certain which character was meant, so Mojibuster leaves that spot unchanged.

How to prevent it

  • Save texts from Word and editors as UTF-8 and state the encoding when importing.
  • Check the character set in newsletter tools and shop systems – it should be UTF-8 everywhere.
  • With e-mails, the cause is often on the sender’s side. Here’s how to make them readable in Outlook.
  • In databases, set tables and the connection to utf8mb4 – see MySQL and phpMyAdmin.

Frequently asked questions

What does ’ mean?

That’s a double-encoded apostrophe: the text was converted wrongly twice. Mojibuster repairs that as well – more on double-encoded characters.

Should I just replace them with straight quotes?

You don’t have to. Mojibuster restores the original characters. If you prefer ' and ", you can still replace them afterwards.

Why are only the quotes broken, not the accents?

Then the text was probably partly retyped or comes from two sources. Mojibuster only repairs the broken spots and leaves correct characters alone.

More guides