Are you referring to the quotation marks? I see that they look different but on the console, they look the same (pasted over). I switched to single (’) and no difference.
What makes you think that the plus symbol isn’t being “recognized”?
When I look at your code above, I see that you have fancy curly quotes around “This is the end.”. My guess is that you are using an Apple device. If so, you have to turn off “Smart Punctuation”.
An unexpected side effect of Apple’s new Smart Punctuation feature in iOS 11 has manifested and is causing some problems with apps that use Core Data to store strings. … The null byte insertion prematurely ends a string, which as a best case causes a truncation of data —but can also lead to instability and crashing.
It’s not this site our either one of you messing up.
Rather it’s Apple making incomplete and broke software.
There is a bug with this challenge, so you can skip it. However, if your device is using the fancy curly quotes you won’t be able to pass challenges with strings.