Why does jira replace typographically correct quotation marks and apostrophes by legacy typewriter double and singlequotes?

Question

When I type « it’s “ok” » (where the apostrophe is U+2019 and the quotes are U+201C then U+201D) in my JIRA texts (subjects and descriptions), JIRA replaces them with typewriter characters (resepctively U+0027, U+0022 and U+0022 again).

How in JIRA can we disable this downgrade and why isn’t it off by default?

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

I've been having some "fun" with UTF and encoding recently - my instincts on this one is that JIRA doesn't want to store high value unicode characters, and is translating your text into something more standard and supportable.

(The specific example was someone using an emoji unicode in a comment - not only does it not display, it totally breaks data migrations into half of the supported databases)

Joe Pitt · Answer

Be careful. I've used a couple other tools that allow the 'smart quotes' as Microsoft calls them but when they are stored in the database (one was Oracle and I don't know the other but I think it is mysql) and then exported in csv format for management reports I get unprintable characters that I need to fix.