When I type ;t it is replaced with 't;t on Apple devices

Question

There is some sort of typing assist feature on my Apple products that substitutes a correction that is itself incorrect and it's been around for a decade or more and I've been living with it for all this time, but it's really annoying. Whenever I type a contraction such as wasn;t it corrects it it with wasn't;t. I'm guessing that somewhere along the line I had a keyboard that had the ; where the ' was and I end up more often than not typing the semicolon in error.

I have tried to locate the problem in the spelling dictionary and the typing assist feature of text substitution, but there is no such correction there. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to correct this? I have even see the behavior in the iPhone/iPad simulator when using the computer keyboard to enter text, but not every time. I have several computers and iOS devices at home and at work and it happens on all of them. The problem doesn't;t seem to be app specific since it happens in nearly every app.

Answer 1

I believe you are referring to the Symbol & Text Substitution feature. Here is how you can remove an auto-substitution entry:

1. Open System Preferences.
2. Click "Keyboard".
3. Click on the "Text" tab.
4. In the table, locate the problematic entry, click it, and press the (-) button.

If you have other devices on the same iCloud account, this should sync to them too.

Answer 2

As Joseph said, you can fix this with text replacement. If you want to do it on iOS:

1. Open Settings
2. General
3. Keyboard
4. Text replacement

Then, once you get to text replacement (on any device) if there isn't already a text replacement there you can just delete, you could add a new text replacement correcting 't;t to ;t. This way it would not switch to what you don't want.