Quotes, dashes, or special characters get distorted after pasting.
Wrong Characters or Symbols After Pasting from Word
Key Points: You paste content from Word and suddenly see strange characters like  or “smart quotes” turned into junk.
Instead of em-dashes or apostrophes, you get garbled code. Characters that looked fine in Word become HTML chaos in WordPress.
😬 Why It Happens
- Hidden formatting from Word adds non-UTF-8 characters
- Improper encoding during paste action
- Browser may apply incorrect character conversion
🛠️ Fix It Like a Pro
- Paste into a plain text editor first (like Notepad or TextEdit) to strip formatting
- Use the “Paste as Text” option in the editor toolbar
- Check that your database and site charset is set to UTF-8
🔎 Bonus
Use a find/replace plugin to quickly clean odd characters from existing content.