WordPress fails to escape fancy apostrophes

[IanMoody]

When copying text from elswhere like another website (and I would guess Microsoft Word with smart formatting or whatever it's called on) if it contains the ’ character WordPress doesn't escape it.

Does it need to be escaped?

I'd like anything over ASCII 127 to be escaped. When I back up and restore my database, all those characters show up as question marks in the restored blog.

The likelihood that I'm missing something obvious is reasonably high, however...

Perhaps it's better addressed as a plugin?

It doesn't absolutely NEED to be escaped, but it will make the page fail validation if it isn't, and considering lots of users seem to struggle maintaining validation with only small edits to their templates I see no reason to knock their error count up another point, especially for something this easy to fix (I believe it should be anyway). And hughbiquitous your problem sounds like the wrong content encoding header being sent by the page, that's usually the reason I see question marks when surfing.

hugh: database backup and restore are touchy areas for character encoding because the database server settings matter and they cannot be controlled by WordPress. That's a different issue Forcing all of our db storage to ASCII 0-127 is probably not a good option.

Ian: Your initial description leaves a lot to be assumed. Are you talking about the Write screen? With or without WYSIWYG? What character code is that?

Are you aware of wptexturize declared in functions-formatting.php? Can you try to work in a fix?

Thanks.

No response to Andy's questions. Marking WONTFIX for now. Please do reopen if additional details to add to the discussion.