Wordpress has long had a feature that dynamically replaces standard characters with their more visually appealing (and perhaps more accurate) symbols. In some cases the formatting may not be desirable.

Last year I wrote a few articles on Exchange Server errors. The errors typically follow the form of 0xNumber, ex. 0x8000000F. What wordpress was doing was replacing the “x” in the error with a “times” or multiplication symbol. So 0x0 would show up as 0×0.