I recently found that an ellipsis (…) in a WordPress (3.3.1) post/page would cause random quote marks to show up around the words surrounding that ellipsis. I noticed this behavior on Chrome (25) on two different hosts (neither are my website). The original text of the post was just three periods placed next to each other but when the page/post was requested the three periods were converted to the … HTML character. Having found that the behavior happened when the HTML character was used, my quick solution was to put a space between each period. Here are some test lines.
This is a test…of three periods.
This is a test…of the HTML ellipsis.
This is a test. . .of the periods with spaces.
Here is the source of the above lines that is served. You can see that the first line gets converted to the ellipsis character.
<p>This is a test…of three periods.</p> <p>This is a test…of the HTML ellipsis.</p> <p>This is a test. . .of the periods with spaces.</p>
I can’t duplicate the quotes on my host or WordPress version. Again, I have only observed behavior in Chrome (25) on WordPress (3.3.1). So probably the real fix is to upgrade WordPress. That said, it really seems to be a bug in Chrome too.
Please post your theories and solutions.