Certain characters in Wordpress not displaying correctly

[MrsBee]

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Hi all,

In Wordpress if I type out 'Women's Shoes' (for example) as part of my post, when I publish the post and then view the source code in my web browser, it doesn't display the apostrophe correctly - instead it displays the following string of characters:-

& # 8 2 1 7 ;

(Above, I have had to type them out with spaces in between, otherwise it would not display correctly! However, in my HTML they are all squashed up and, as I say, they take the place of any apostrophe that I try to use.)

I have a couple of questions, if I may:-

1. Does this cause a problem when search engine robots are spidering my site? Do they recognise the string of characters above (when squashed up) and do they know that it is meant to be an apostrophe?
   
2. At the top of my page Wordpress has placed 'charset=UTF-8'. I wonder if this is the correct character set I should be using, or should I change it to something else?

Many thanks to anybody who may be able to assist me!

[pete_coles]

Always use utf-8 mate, it's pretty standard. As for the encoding, this is the unicode for an apostophie. As different fonts and systems have different features you may find that some characters will display as an error in their text form (usually in mozilla its displayed as a box).
Using unicode encoding will minimise this problem.

As for search engines, no idea but as they're machines I'd imagine that machine code won't make any difference.

For your reference:
List of Unicode characters - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Miscellaneous Symbols - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Unicode - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[MrsBee]

Thanks for your reply Pete and for the links - I shall keep my fingers crossed then and hopefully all will be well!