HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
1–10 of 85 posts
Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#2"Sun Ra" might not be the sun god you are thinking of .....
Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#3[deleted]
Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#4What is a soft quote?
Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#5What is a soft quote?
They are better known as "smart quotes"
iOS at the least by default will substitute "dumb" quotes with smart quotes in text boxes.
Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#6What is a soft quote?
[deleted]
Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#7"Sun Ra" might not be the sun god you are thinking of ..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1ToFXHW5pg
Yes, I know who Sun Ra is. Because I didn't see ^Ra$ in my list of common nouns then it means that there hasn't been a comment just about Ra. But now there has: Ra. Ra. Ra. 4 times total now :-)
Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#8Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#9Speculation, but two causes could be:
- Writing in a plaintext editor before copying into HN.
- Using a third party HN client that only supports plaintext. For example, I imagine there might be at least a few people out there who might access HN from a terminal client?
Re: HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are better known as "smart quotes" iOS at the least by default will substitute "dumb" quotes with smart quotes in text boxes.
Looking around, I got the impression they're double rather than single quotes.
That's incorrect.
This is a double quote: ", 0x22, ascii
This is a smart open quote: “, 0x201c, unicode
This is a smart close quote: ”, 0x201d, unicode
By default your keyboard double-quote key produces the ascii double quote mark, and that is what's used for quoting in virtually every programming language.
Word and many email clients will use smart-quotes by default, but they're pretty rare in programming, hence why the "some among us" phrasing calling them out as strange.
That's what the linked repo is referring to by soft quotes, and the command given specifically uses 0x201d above.