On: Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

[DerekL]

Probably an encoding error. An m-dash is E2 80 94 in UTF-8. (An n-dash is E2 80 93.) I suspect that the original UTF-8 is misinterpreted as ISO 8859-1 or a similar encoding, where 0xE2 is “â”, and the other two are unassigned or control characters.

[hinkley → DerekL]

Sounds about right.

As a rule of thumb if you see a’s with accents you’re loooking at a UTF-8 encoding problem.