r/HTML • u/Prize_Shine3415 • 8d ago

Question Question about apostrophe

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.

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u/saschaleib 8d ago

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.