131–140 of 195 posts
to add to the confusion: ' PRIME (U+2032) " DOUBLE PRIME aka inch mark (U+2033) have their own codepoints http://practicaltypography.com/foot-and-inch-marks.html which describes implications for typesetting coordinates and other things: 118° 19′ 43.5″ 118° 19’ 43.5” wrong (curly quotes, although it renders identical in some fonts) 118° 19' 43.5" right
An ʻokina (U+02BB, as found in "Hawaiʻi") is neither an apostrophe nor a left quotation mark.
It doesn't look that much better, and it always fucks with me at random times. That shit is on the list of annoying problems that shouldn't exist in the first place, along with the \nl\cr thing, and the txt saved as rtf thing, and the UTF-8 encoding-character-at-the-beginning-of-the-file or whatever it is called.
Someone complains your program gives them an error when they open a csv file you sent them. You tested your program, it works. You go on the phone with them for 30 minutes, try to figure out what the fuck was going on. There it is, it was opened in a program that meddles with that "" and replaces it with the “” shit.
Also, there has to be at least one time you're fucked by the "" -> “” snobbiness when you go to a random Wordpress site and paste the command they tell you to do to the command line and realize it doesn't work. You pull your hair for a couple of minutes, and there is that sneaky ” thing. Wordpress does that for anything it doesn't think as code (inb4 ”good programmers don't paste commands from wordpress to GNU+bash“).
One of the first things that I do when I set up a new Mac computer is to turn that damn "" -> “” ““““feature”””” off.
I hate the "" -> “” thing with a passion. I don't know how much productivity that the world has lost with that “” shit. It doesn't look that much better, and it always fucks with me at random times. That shit is on the list of annoying problems that shouldn't exist in the first place, along with the \nl\cr thing, and the txt saved as rtf thing, and the UTF-8 encoding-character-at-the-beginning-of-the-file or whatever…
That thing's the BOM.
I would fain use the curly quotes if only Darwin's groff(1) wouldn't barf on them. For the time being, man pages for one still need to quote like ``this''.
If you’re writing manpages, though, you should be using the -mdoc macros (https://manpages.bsd.lv/mdoc.html), which have “Dq” and “Sq” macros that wrap the arguments in double and single quotes respectively.
I hate the "" -> “” thing with a passion. I don't know how much productivity that the world has lost with that “” shit. It doesn't look that much better, and it always fucks with me at random times. That shit is on the list of annoying problems that shouldn't exist in the first place, along with the \nl\cr thing, and the txt saved as rtf thing, and the UTF-8 encoding-character-at-the-beginning-of-the-file or whatever…
John Doe ‘42
An abomination ‘cause it's a damn apostrophe, not opening a quotation.
CSB: Years ago I was working on a team that developed a scripting language and we had this recurring problem where someone would write up a code sample in a Word document and it would break if you cut and pasted it because all of the single and double quotes would be Unicode. My boss was this tough guy who tried to snap the whole team to a standard of strictly disabling that behavior in all of our Office applications…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've been trying to push TSV (tab separated values) as a standard response/implementation when they ask for CSV. "Yes but its comma separated!", sure is, but text can contain commas... I have seen issues with Google Spreadsheets not recognizing the tabs however... Excel doesnt know what to do with a TSV either. But both have a complete wizard for parsing CSV...
Also most CSV parsers support quotation marks and escaping to get around the comma and new line et al problems. eg:
"full name", "address"
"Homer Simpson", "742 Evergreen Terrace,\nSpringfield"
"Bart \"El Barto\" Simpson", "742 Evergreen Terrace,\nSpringfield"
As a side note, the best spreadsheet I've found for manipulating CSV data without breaking the formatting upon saving was OpenOffice Calc. This was a few years back before the LibreOffice fork was created as I've thankfully not needed to deal with CSV files large enough to warrant a full blown spreadsheet editor, but I would assume LibreOffice Calc would behave the same.
We now have two characters for apostrophe and extra ambiguity for processing correct right single quotes. Great job not breaking historical documents Unicode.
I hate the "" -> “” thing with a passion. I don't know how much productivity that the world has lost with that “” shit. It doesn't look that much better, and it always fucks with me at random times. That shit is on the list of annoying problems that shouldn't exist in the first place, along with the \nl\cr thing, and the txt saved as rtf thing, and the UTF-8 encoding-character-at-the-beginning-of-the-file or whatever…
System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text -> Use smart quotes and dashes (uncheck).
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…