Why is ↔ turned into ↔️?

On Anki for iOS, the note content ↔ (U+2194) ist turned into ↔️ automatically. Why and how do I get my text back? Thanks!

This is most likely due to iOS, not Anki. See this explanation.

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On desktop, both symbols are displayed identically. To make this a bit clearer, I inspected the raw content of my clipboard and found the following:

  • the original only contains U+2194 (LEFT RIGHT ARROW)
  • the replacement contains both U+2194 and U+FE0F (VARIATION SELECTOR-16)

As to why something like this might happen, here’s an excerpt from the manual:

Text like á can be represented in multiple ways on a computer, such as using a specific code for that symbol, or by using a standard a and then another code for the accent on top. This causes problems when mixing input from different sources, or using different computers - if your computer handles keyboard input in one form, but the content is stored in a different form, it will not match when searching, even though the end result appears identical.

To ensure content can easily be found in searches, Anki normalizes the text to a standard form.

But I think @BlackBeans is right here and it’s just iOS messing with your input.

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Yep, this seems to happen when viewing the forum post on iOS as well. Maybe changing the font in the card template will help?