Special Characters in Twitter Message on WordPress SexyBookmarks Plugin

I recently installed the SexyBookmarks WordPress plugin on my blog (as you can see below). If you hover over the Twitter badge, you’ll notice my default sharing message includes both apostrophes and quotation marks. (While you’re down there, feel free to share this post =)) Seems simple enough, right?

This is deceptively simple, due to a shortcoming somewhere in the plugin or WordPress itself. I didn’t spend too much time investigating.. Just found a solution that satisfied me and moved on with my life (including writing this so you have a solution too).

The problem: The SexyBookmarks plugin and/or WordPress escapes the special characters in Twitter message after saving it. (You’ll notice backslashes before these characters, such as apostrophes and quotes, in the message editing textarea after saving it.) Furthermore, you’ll notice when actually trying to share a page via Twitter, for a message like

I’m currently reading “${title}” by @codyaray - ${short_link}

you’ll get something like

I\'m currently reading \quot;${title}\quot; by @codyaray - http://bit.ly/shortcode

when you try to share a post on Twitter. That’s no good.

My solution: Type up your message in MS Word or another rich text editor that auto replaces your ASCII special characters with Unicode chars. Thus, the message becomes

I’m currently reading “${title}” by @codyaray - ${short_link}

Well, typesetting on my blog makes those two indistinguishable to you, but I swear they’re different. Try it for yourself. It works.

Eureka! It’s not ideal, but it does the trick nicely.