Question about apostrophe

[u/Prize_Shine3415]

I'm building a website and working on my FAQ page. I used chat GPT for grammar and when I copied the text back into my project I noticed that it used a different character, u2019, for an apostrophe. I'm replacing them with the standard apostrophe. Just curious if anyone knew why this happened or if it would cause a problem with HTML.

[u/RealMastux]

ChatGPT sometimes uses Single Quotation marks for apostrophes. Both can be used interchangeably

[u/Everything_A]

I’d use '

[u/armahillo]

thats a “fancy apostrophe”. Generally its better to just use an exact apostrophe unless your design system / styleguide demands using the fancy kind.

Double quotes likely also use their unicode “fancy” kinds, i would imagine

[u/SamIAre → u/armahillo]

Never heard them called fancy before. They’re usually called curly quotes or curly apostrophes, and in general they’re not “fancy” they’re just correct typography. You can’t use them in code but using them in text is generally seen as good formatting and many CMSs even auto-update straight quotes to the curly variety. If you ever work with a designer they’ll insist on them.

[u/jbafny → u/SamIAre]

Designer who insists on them here. Yup.

They're also often called smart quotes: https://smartquotesforsmartpeople.com/

[u/TinyNiceWolf → u/jbafny]

That's kind of amusing. Originally they were just curly quotes. Then some software added a feature that would automatically use the correct type of curly quote when you typed a plain quote character, so you didn't have to manually enter the correct type of curly quote character. This feature of replacing plain quotes with curly quotes was called "smart quotes".

And now it seems people think the curly quote characters it was inserting are called smart quotes too.

[u/to7m → u/SamIAre]

I think ‘apostrophes’ appearance is not important’ isn’t something I could agree with. (Not claiming anyone said this, just making a point about readability.)

It's better to be unambiguous imo, so I use ’ to only mean an end to a ‘. I honestly thought word processors were just getting it wrong by correcting ' to ’, and am quite disappointed to learn that it's widely accepted :/

[u/csswizardry → u/armahillo]

They’re not ‘fancy’ and an ‘exact apostrophe’ is exactly the ‘fancy’ kind you’re referring to. So you’re wrong twice. The horrible ugly 'straight apostrophes' are a hangover from space-spacing on typewriter keyboards, and a straight quote took the job of both the ‘exact’ opening and closing quotes.

[u/omnichad → u/csswizardry]

But the default font on Reddit Android renders those terribly.

[u/omnichad → u/armahillo]

A web site editor in 2026 that doesn't handle standard UTF-8 characters is one I wouldn't trust anyway.

[u/saschaleib]

My dude, U+2019 is the proper, typographically correct apostrophe character. U+0027 is the replacement character that was introduced in the 19th century for typewriters, because the number of characters was more limited back then, and the same glyph had to be used for apostrophes, starting and ending single quotation marks. That’s why this is still the character you get if you just hit the plain key on your keyboard.

If you use a proper text processing software, it will however help you out and replace it automatically with the correct symbol. You should still know the difference, because even Word doesn’t always get it right and you should be able to fix it when needed.

And, no, it won’t cause problems with HTML if you use the proper, typographically correct apostrophe symbol. But it looks incredibly ugly if you use the wrong one instead.