Understanding Special Characters in Markdown Pages

If you’ve noticed strange characters like ’ in your markdown pages—or you’re just wondering what those #, *, and - symbols actually do—this guide is for you.

Markdown is a lightweight formatting language used to create clean, structured pages for AI bots (like ChatGPT or Perplexity). But sometimes, encoding issues or unfamiliar symbols can trip you up. Let’s break it all down!

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Why Do Weird Characters Like ’ Show Up?

These odd symbols are called mojibake, and they usually happen when a page is converted into markdown using different text encoding.

For example: A curly apostrophe (’) from Word or Google Docs might get garbled and turn into ’ if UTF-8 text is read as Latin-1 or Windows-1252.

Common Mojibake Examples

Mojibake	UTF-8 Character	Intended Meaning
’	'	Apostrophe (right single quote)
‘	'	Left single quote
“	"	Left double quote
�	"	Right double quote
—	—	Em dash
–	–	En dash
…	…	Ellipsis
â„¢	™	Trademark symbol
Â	(usually nothing)	Non-breaking space
•	•	Bullet point
€	€	Euro symbol

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What Do Markdown Symbols Like #, * , and -Do?

Markdown uses a handful of easy-to-remember characters to apply structure and style to your content. Here’s a quick guide:

Headers (#)

• Use # to create headings of different sizes.

# H1 - Page Title
## H2 - Section Header
### H3 - Subsection Header
#### H4 - Smaller Subsection

These are used to organize content hierarchically and help both humans and LLMs (Large Language Models) understand your page structure.

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Bulleted Lists (- or *)

• Use - or * followed by a space to create bullet points:

- Chocolate Peanut Butter
- Cinnamon Toast
- Madagascar Vanilla

Tip: Keep all bullets aligned and avoid mixing dashes and asterisks in the same list for consistency.

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Bold Text (**bold**)

• Surround text with double asterisks to make it bold:

**One-time Purchase:** ~$71.94~ $29.99

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Example Markdown Section

Here’s what real markdown might look like in one of your Bubblegum product pages:

#### Individual Flavor Packets

- Chocolate Peanut Butter  
- Cinnamon Toast  
- Caffe Mocha  
- Cookies & Cream  
- Madagascar Vanilla  
- Rich Chocolate  
- Sea Salt Caramel  
- Strawberry Cream

### Purchase Options

- **One-time Purchase:** ~$71.94~ $29.99  
- **Subscribe & Save (Best Deal):** ~$71.94~ $62.94 every 3 weeks; delivered every 4 weeks; cancel or pause any time  
- **Add to Cart:** Out of Stock

This would render as:

Individual Flavor Packets

• Chocolate Peanut Butter

• Cinnamon Toast

• Caffe Mocha

• Cookies & Cream

• Madagascar Vanilla

• Rich Chocolate

• Sea Salt Caramel

• Strawberry Cream

Purchase Options

• One-time Purchase: $71.94 $29.99

• Subscribe & Save (Best Deal): $71.94 $62.94 every 3 weeks; delivered every 4 weeks; cancel or pause any time

• Add to Cart: Out of Stock

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Do I Need to Remove Mojibake?

The good news: mojibake will not impact how AI models read or interpret your page. Bots like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude are trained to recognize and mentally “correct” these characters—so your content will still be understood, ranked, and referenced correctly.

That said, if you’d like to clean things up for your own internal readability or for a polished brand experience, you can easily remove these characters:

🛠️ How to Remove Mojibake:

1

Open your markdown file in any text or code editor.

2

Use “Find and Replace” (e.g., Cmd + F or Ctrl + F) to search for mojibake patterns (like ’, “, Â, etc.).

3

Replace them with the correct characters using the reference table above.

4

Save your file and re-upload or re-publish it to Bubblegum.