Hello!
This is intentional behavior and there’s nothing you need to do. Search engines and all popular social platforms can decode special HTML characters from titles and descriptions; after all, HTML elements may contain HTML entities.
Here’s why we do this: TSF parses titles and descriptions through WordPress’s texturization (wptexturize()), which converts hyphens (charcode 45) to en-dashes (charcode 8211). Funnily, its documentation page fails to show a hyphen correctly but shows an en-dash instead.
In any case, because the hyphen is often used as a title separator, we want to maintain the unaltered hyphen. So, to prevent wptexturize() from converting the hyphen to an en-dash, we convert the hyphen to an HTML formatted hyphen: -.
Still, some users wish to show an em-dash (using two hyphens: -- = —), or endash as intended. So, we determine when we insert the - using advanced regex.
I hope this makes sense. Cheers!
