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ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

cl.cam.ac.uk

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Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#61

Post by YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 »

gumby wrote: post #38

I find it interesting that the article includes a German keyboard that doesn't include the proper ,,'' (or ,') quotation glyphs. However it does include grave and acute accents as well as French primary quotations ( >) though not the secondary guillemots (quotation characters ) none of which are used in German text. And of course I used ascii analogues to type these into HN :-(

>And of course I used ascii analogues to type these into HN :-(

But why, though? To the best of my knowledge, HN supports unicode quite well, including the following quotes: »«›‹„“‚‘ (available with the help of AltGr and sometimes shift from keys y, x, v, b when selecting the German keyboard layout on my computer).

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#62

Post by dragonwriter »

eesmith wrote: post #48
lisper wrote: post #41

The fact that ASCII does not have balanced quotes is one of the great catastrophes of computing. It makes everything more complicated than it needs to be, from embedding code in strings to parsing CSV files, to regexps. For example, if I want to embed a quoted string in another quoted string, I have to escape the inner quotes like so: "This is string containing an embedded \"quoted\" string" Then I have to think abou…

The complexity might be minimized, but not avoided. You would still need an escape mechanism for something like «She said «The \» key on the server doesn't work.»» ASCII did add , [], and {}, any of which could have been used for quoted strings, had the programming language designers chosen that option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_literal#Paired_delimite... points out that PostScript and Tcl have a string li…

Also Ruby:

  %q{This is a string with an %q{embedded quote}.}

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#63

Post by tedunangst »

hk__2 wrote: post #58
tome wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If ASCII had balanced quotes then they would be used by programming languages to delimit strings and we would be back to square one with regards to escaping them!

You don’t need escaping in «This is a string containing an «embedded» quoted string».

Debatable whether that would actually work in practice.

    /* nested /* comments */ don't work */

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#64

Post by jgtrosh »

Symbiote wrote: post #54
leephillips wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody's keyboard had an em-dash key (well, maybe some compositor keyboards...). It's well worth the time to figure out how to enter at least the most useful Unicode characters. See, here's an em-dash: —.

Linux users should enable the compose key, it's very useful. Test it with: setxkbmap -option compose:menu Then press the menu/compose key (next to right control), then C, then =. You get €. Try compose, 1, 2 for ½. Compose, ^, 3 for ³. Compose, A, : for Ä. It's pretty intuitive for the most useful characters, and easily the fastest way I have of typing the ö, ñ and å in various colleagues' names.

Actually, A: is not valid with the default compose bindings (it is however valid with vim digraphs). In general umlauts or trémas are inserted with the double quote (A").

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#65

Post by tedunangst »

kazinator wrote: post #12

> Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote'). Tell that to GCC: /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/../../../i386-linux-gnu/crt1.o: In function `_start': (.text+0x18): undefined reference to `main' Looks good to me, by the way. > Where ``quoting like this'' comes from I did it for a while out…

gcc will output fancy Unicode quotes if you set locale. This of course even more fun if LANG is set incorrectly and you still have an 8 bit xterm; then the entire quoted string just disappears!

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#66

Post by XaspR8d »

kazinator wrote: post #32
Freak_NL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then you should still stick to ASCII unless you have other good reasons to. Why? Using non-ASCII Unicode characters acts like a nice canary for detecting character encoding issues. Besides, why would I purposely limit my text to ASCII? It doesn't even suffice for English, let alone almost any other language I use ­— including my native language Dutch, German, and Japanese.

All sorts of reasons. Diagnostic printf message in some embedded firmware. Do you need to drag Unicode into it? Git log message. Ditto.

Not specifically trying to weigh in on the overall conversation, but aren't git commands generally UTF-8?

> git commit and git commit-tree issues a warning if the commit log message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string, unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding.

> git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified.

[from https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit]

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#67

Post by PickNChoose »

lisper wrote: post #53
eesmith wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexity might be minimized, but not avoided. You would still need an escape mechanism for something like «She said «The \» key on the server doesn't work.»» ASCII did add , [], and {}, any of which could have been used for quoted strings, had the programming language designers chosen that option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_literal#Paired_delimite... points out that PostScript and Tcl have a string li…

> You would still need an escape mechanism for something like... Yes, but that's a pretty rare case, much more so than embedded strings. Even that case could be solved by having two different quotes, like Python which allows both 'string' and "string". So you could do: «This is a string that mentions the ” character without escaping it» “This is a string that mentions the « character without escaping it” Yes, there a…

You don't want any 'rare' cases at all. That's the point.

Stop using "punctuation" when you are attempting to "delimit" text. Use a character that is not punctuation, specifically designed for "field delimiter" purposes.

Trying to do two things at once is ridiculous.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#68

Post by zaxomi »

lisper wrote: post #41

The fact that ASCII does not have balanced quotes is one of the great catastrophes of computing. It makes everything more complicated than it needs to be, from embedding code in strings to parsing CSV files, to regexps. For example, if I want to embed a quoted string in another quoted string, I have to escape the inner quotes like so: "This is string containing an embedded \"quoted\" string" Then I have to think abou…

Actually, ASCII have mechanism for solving the problem that you describe, with control codes FS, GS, RS and US.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#69

Post by mark-r »

fish_fan wrote: post #44
mark-r wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I need a special character, I find a web page or document that has it and use copy/paste.

Even then the character pallete built into MacOS is much more convenient for searching, saving, and inputting.

The character palette built into Windows uses too small a font, I find it almost useless. And the size is not adjustable. I've been tempted on more than one occasion to write my own.

Re: ASCII and Unicode quotation marks

#70

Post by stephengillie »

dragonwriter wrote: post #62
eesmith wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexity might be minimized, but not avoided. You would still need an escape mechanism for something like «She said «The \» key on the server doesn't work.»» ASCII did add , [], and {}, any of which could have been used for quoted strings, had the programming language designers chosen that option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_literal#Paired_delimite... points out that PostScript and Tcl have a string li…

Also Ruby: %q{This is a string with an %q{embedded quote}.}

Powershell: "This is a string with an 'embedded quote'."

It's helpful to remember that quotes will interpret the variables inside, while apostrophes will not. Very useful for scripting the creation of scripts. Example:

"It is $time" > It is 15:22

'It is $time' > It is $time

"'$time' is $time" > '$time' is 15:22

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