At the link given in the post that started it all:

BS: Lies about MSNBC 18 Dec 10 - 11:07 AM

I see broken characters for all the "curly quotes" (double and single) and apostrophes in the post by Amos. In other of his posts hyphens appear to come through okay, but the (rare) n-dash and the more common m-dash are also broken. Since nobody has argued about whether they see them as broken, I must assume that others also see them displayed that way - or weren't interested enough to look at what was being discussed.

I can go to the source page he copied from and paste it into Word. When I copy it back into a mudcat "Reply to Thread" box and preview it (or post it) it posts normally with no broken characters.

Comments at by Grishka, at the link and one following a couple of posts below, may be close to explaining the "problem" I've been playing with.

At the second link, Guest,Grishka suggests changing encoding. If I change the encoding for my browser to UTF-8 the broken characters change to char FFFD (which normally represents an undefined char) and I can no longer tell whether they're left double quotes or right double quotes. A couple of other encodings show slightly different chars for the broken ones; but I can't get rid of them by using any of the different encodings I've tried. Of course I haven't tried all the possible languages (128 of them IIRC), or even the 18 different flavors of English that IE and Office offer. I didn't see "Canuck" as an encoding.

Note that although it's generally believed that Amos uses a Mac, what he does should not be assumed to be representative of Mac users in general. The broken pastes may actually be done by his weasel dogs when he's not looking. His posts, however, are generally consistent whenever he pastes from outside sources, with the same (and some other) char breaks as in the sample.

I've archived comments here that are of interest to me. Since this is an edited thread I assume it will all go away when the rest of you are finished playing with the problem.

John