Why on earth is a “-” displaying as a question mark?

Question

• My WPF application is reading a text file and populating a listbox.

• Whenever I have text surrounded by a dash symbol ie "-", the line in notepad will look like this for eg "SAMPLE - TEXT"

• When it displays it in the application, the dash turns into a question mark !?!?!?

• I then have an Export button, which writes these back to a textfile. When that symbol is written back, in notepad it turns into a square!?!?!?

• Why on earth is this happening? Please see the screenshot

  http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/9893/whatthey.png

Answer 1

It's probably not a dash, it's some unicode character that looks like a dash.

Press the minus key on your keyboard and retype it.

Answer 2

Most likely it's an en dash or em dash rather than a real hyphen or minus symbol.

Typesetters will most likely try to track you down and beat you to death if they discover you're using the wrong term :-)