Why Weird Text When Using Apostrophe in Messages, etc.?

I'm seeing oddities in some places but not currently in the archived message body itself.

For example, a message cited below contains ordinary "quotes", which appear normally in the message body. But below the message body, in the message summaries of the thread, some but not all of the close quotes have been translated into HTML character entity references.

But your description sounds more like the character encoding problem that crops up when the UTF-8 code for Right Single Quotation Mark is used as a substitute for ASCII apostrophe. Or Left and Right Double Quotation Marks are used to substitute for ASCII double quote. Or non-breaking space substitutes for space.

If the latter case is the correct diagnosis then this is a very old problem, one that has existed since the emergence of UTF-8 as an encoding standard, but has become more prominent since various mail services began using UTF-8 by default, and some started making the character substitutions listed.

While the help page below refers to other languages, the same applies to the character translations.

For what it is worth, I use apostrophes all the time in the places you list, and don't see any weird text. So some more specifics on what you did that caused weird characters would be useful. Maybe even screen shots.

I believe it's something Yahoo has to fix, and this has been going on for a while-

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AksG8...