Decoding Legacy Content: ' vs ' vs " — The Hidden Bugs
You inherited a database full of old CMS posts. Some use ', others ', some just ". When you decode them, everything looks fine — until it breaks in production.
The Problem
'is not valid in HTML4 → becomes literal text in old browsers'works everywhere but is verbose- Raw
'inside inline JavaScript breaks strings - Mixing formats makes search/replace unreliable
Real Failure Cases
A major news site lost 8 hours of traffic because a headline with “O’Reilly” used ' — which rendered as literal ' in JSON-LD, breaking Google rich results.
How This Tool Fixes It
Our decoder normalizes all variants to the correct character in one pass. Paste any mess of legacy entities — get clean, correct text ready for modern JSON, JavaScript, or HTML5.
FAQ
Should I ever keep '?
Never. Convert everything to ' or just ' depending on context.
What about " vs "?
Same story. " is only needed inside HTML attributes with double quotes.
Legacy content doesn’t have to stay broken.