&#8211 is in TITLE instead of a Dash

I cannot replicate such behavior on my similar no plugins, default theme site.

Did you copy/paste the title from elsewhere? If the source contained the entity code, the WP editor will not convert entity codes to respective characters in titles. Instead only the initial & is encoded, making the remaining #8211; ineffective as entity code.

If you were to enter or paste in the actual – character, it should remain that way. The only way I get the behavior you describe on my site is if I literally type in & # 8 2 1 1 ; (without the spaces).

No, just typed it in when it was installed and it still has the default tagline.

So my title is (I have removed the ; as it will render as the dash on here)

<title>WordPress Test Site &#8211 Just another WordPress site</title>

It has to be something related to my VPS setup then, as when I add content on a new page with a dash an apostrophe, it shows it as code when viewing the page source.

Does anyone know what I need to check and turn on/off to fix?

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by GregW.

OK, if you actually type in the entity code as a title, WP will display the title exactly as you typed — the entity code instead of the n-dash it’s supposed to represent. To get an n-dash in a title, you actually have to type (or paste) in the n-dash character. This is normal WP behavior. Nothing wrong with your VPS.

If your keyboard cannot generate an n-dash character through keypress, you’ll need to copy/paste it from elsewhere, like a word processor where you can pick special characters from a grid.

But I am not and cannot add that dash, it is auto created by WordPress.

For example Page Title – Website Title

The – between them is created by WordPress not me entering anything.

The result is Page Title &#8211 Website Title

Same with the site title

Site Title – Just another WordPress site

Where again I do not add the dash, it is inserted by WordPress

Result is still

Site Title &#8211 Just another WordPress site

The same thing happens for a dash and apostrophes in the content, possibly other punctuation etc I have not yet tested

On more testing, it is only the dash, underscore and apostrophe that appear to be having an issue

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by GregW.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by GregW.

Oh, that title! Sorry for my being dense.

The page’s charset meta tag is “UTF-8”, isn’t it?

That dash should get entity encoded into the proper &.#8211; (without the dot), but then your browser should automatically decode it back to –. It sounds like some added filter is causing this to be double encoded.

Viewing the page’s source HTML, what does the title meta tag have for a value? You’ll have to insert dots or something into any entity codes before sharing here. I think you may be getting something like Site Title &.amp;#8211; Just another WordPress Site, which would cause the output you’re seeing.

But there shouldn’t be any added filter in a default WP installation with no plugins. That’s essentially my site as well, and I cannot replicate the problem you’re having. Does your site have a /wp-content/mu-plugins/ folder which contains any files or sub-folders? Any code there could be causing double encoding. The code there can be disabled as a test by renaming /mu-plugins/.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by bcworkz.

Hi guys

I’m also having the same issue.
I’m trying to make a custom API with register_rest_route() and some CPT (with CPT-UI Plugin) and, in the title of the post, if I put a “-” (hyphen) it shows a— (m-dash!) in the JSON. And shows – (n-dash!) (no mistake typing!) in the view source of the rendered Post.

While we’re at encoding, let me say it’s getting very dificcult to come up with a solution to clean all the html comments from the body text. I searched everywhere, tried every encoding, striping, and none is perfect.
The best, so far, was to put wp_strip_all_tags() in get_the_content() and show_in_Rest = false (which sounds weird) in the CPT Plugin options.

But I’m sure there is a better solution for this.. (I hope)

I have the same issue with Zapier + WordPress, if a title contains a punctuation sign, it will be transformed into an HTML code. Contacted Zapier support and they said it’s a WordPress issue

When I write titles in wordpress with a dash (-) between my brand name and a few lines about it then its shows this &#8211 instead of dash sign.

for example:
newwebsite – my new business website

but its shows like
newwebsite &#8211 my new business website

Please help in this regard. Please its a humble request.

Yes it is still an ongoing issue.

Hi there,

I encountered the same issue when trying to add dash “-” into my titles (replaced automatically by code &#8211) and i found a solution :

(All the codes will be written without semicolon at the end to prevent from automatic formating, so don’t forget to add ; at the end of the code &#8211 when you try this solution).

– Instead of typing – into your title input in the wordpress interface, type the code &#8211
– Then, update the website once to let the wordpress editor format the code to create a hyphen into the title input (hyphen is just a little bit bigger than simple dash)
– Finally, update website a second time to put this hyphen into the web page
– Check your web page to see if it works well

Best regards.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by MJuguet.
• This reply was modified 2 years ago by MJuguet.

Hi guys, I was facing the same issue and the below solution worked for me.

-In my case we were using Laravel framework from backend and the title was passed through PHP as {{ $data }}.
-On passing the title as {!! $data !!} the bug (&#8211 instead of using a dash ) was fixed.

Explaination : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35030977/what-is-the-difference-between-and-in-laravel-blade-files

I have the same error and I can’t solve it in any way

Hello everyone,
these characters are created by WordPress itself through the function wptexturize . This function is called is several places, for example, when rendering:

• the post title: see here
• the post content: see here

and several other places you can find by searching for wptexturize in the WordPress code.

To solve the issue you can use the run_wptexturize filter or use a remove_filter call, for example:
remove_filter( 'the_title', 'wptexturize' );

Hope this helps solve your issue.

Thanks a lot @gmosso

@ridesirat What did you add to your functions.php file?

I used remove_filter( ‘the_title’, ‘wptexturize’ );

but this did not fix it. I still have both (removed ; to show code and not dash)

&#x2d and &#8211

Does this also meant to work in the title metas like og and twitter titles

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by GregW.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by GregW.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by GregW.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by GregW.