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ASCII and Unicode quotation marks
- ratmice 9y agoFYI For a long time GNU coding standards prescribed using the grave accent, but this changed some years ago now https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Quote-Characters.html#Quote-Characters https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Quote-Character...
- josteink 9y agoFrom the link: > Although GNU programs traditionally used 0x60 (‘`’) for opening and 0x27 (‘'’) for closing quotes, nowadays quotes ‘`like this'’ are typically rendered asymmetrically, so quoting ‘"like this"’ or ‘'like this'’ typically looks better. Is this link saying I can quit using `QUOTES' in my Emacs-documentation? That style always struck me as odd :)
- lottin 9y agoCurved single quotes (‘...’) are recommended now: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Documentation-Tips.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Do...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- darkengine 9y agoMS PGothic, a very common font in Japan, still uses this type of quote. "Quoting like this'' (double quote, then two single quotes) looks the most natural in this font. "Using two double quotes" looks quite odd (see screenshot) [1] If you've ever seen an English-language page on a Japanese website that used weird quotes, this is probably why. [1] https://i.imgur.com/zcuFZa1.png https://i.imgur.com/zcuFZa1.png
- boondaburrah 9y agoAh, the old dead giveaway "this game was translated from japanese and we CBA to handle localisation properly" fonts.
- zeratax 9y agoSo I just saw parentheses like this "(）" on japanese twitter it starts with a regular parenthesis "(" but ends with a fullwidth parenthesis "）"(U+FF09) is this a similar thing?
- tempodox 9y agoI 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''.
- robin_reala 9y agobrew install groff? That’ll get you 1.22.3 instead of the default 1.19.2.
- anjbe 9y agoIn troff you can escape “ ” ‘ ’ as \(lq, \(rq, \(oq, \(cq respectively. If you’re writing manpages, though, you should be using the -mdoc macros (https://manpages.bsd.lv/mdoc.html https://manpages.bsd.lv/mdoc.html), which have “Dq” and “Sq” macros that wrap the arguments in double and single quotes respectively.
- peapicker 9y agoI'm pretty sure text like: ``quoted'' Is how you're supposed to write short quotes in the TeX/LaTeX typesetting system. [edit: My point being that the author seems to think this type of quoting originated with X11... which is actually newer than TeX (X11 was first released in 1984), and that the prevalence of this type of quoting likely originated with TeX when it was released in 1978... which isn't mentioned at all in the article. In fact, since TeX/LaTeX is what all the CS, Physics, and Math types were using for journal articles, it is likely the X11 font bitmap glyphs were intentionally shaped like curly quotes to make editing your TeX source files prettier. At least, that's how I remember it...]
- ams6110 9y agoYeah but that gets rendered as the proper quote glyph in the final document.
- ISL 9y agoIt is, and denotes opening and closing quotes.
- dheera 9y agoI always hated this horribly inconsistency. \left( \right) \left{ \right} `` '' Why not \left" \right" \left' \right' Better yet, make it completely DRY: \( \) \{ \} \`` \'' \` \'
- gbacon 9y agoAnother giveaway of a TeX-savvy writer out of water is when you see --- for em-dash, i.e., ‘—’.
- garou 9y agoIt's very odd for me to see the grave accent (`) as quoting mark in bash and other programming languages. I understand that the accent alone lose its function for the human language. But still uncomfortable to se an accent as delimiter to a string.
- sp332 9y agoI'm not even sure why ASCII has a grave accent. There are no combining marks so you could never write it over another letter. Edit: I forgot HTAB was actually part of ASCII. Oh well!
- saint_fiasco 9y agoIn ASCII instead of combining marks what you have to do is write three characters: * The unaccented letter * The backspace character * The accent character If this makes no sense to you, try to imagine a literal, physical typewriter. Windows line terminators also work with a similar principle.
- cesarb 9y agoFrom what I recall from my childhood, physical typewriters worked slightly differently: the accent keys were non-advancing ("dead") keys. You pressed the "acute" key followed by the "e" key for an é, for instance. If you wanted a bare accent, you pressed the accent key followed by the space bar. (The typewriters I recall also didn't have a 0 or 1 key, you used uppercase O or I for these numbers.)
- kps 9y agoYes. I consider it a mistake of Unicode that combining characters follow rather than precede the base character. If they preceded, most dead keys could simply generate the appropriate combining character, rather than requiring complicated input method support. (And finding the end of a sequence of multiple combining character wouldn't require lookahead.)
- treve 9y agoIt just occurred to me how much easier certain text-operations (like syntax highlighting, regular expressions and other parsers) if we consistently used the right unicode symbols for quotes and apostrophes
- mbrock 9y agoThe only languages I know off the top of my head that use balanced delimiters for strings are M4 and Perl 6. Hey, imagine being able to nest strings without escaping! What a concept!
- chaosfox 9y agoPerl does that as well, and you can even choose the delimiters you wanna use: > For the constructs except here-docs, single characters are used as starting and ending delimiters. If the starting delimiter is an opening punctuation (that is (, [, {, or < ), the ending delimiter is the corresponding closing punctuation (that is ), ], }, or >). If the starting delimiter is an unpaired character like / or a closing punctuation, the ending delimiter is the same as the starting delimiter. Therefore a / terminates a qq// construct, while a ] terminates both qq[] and qq]] constructs.
- jstimpfle 9y agoNot a language, but I adopted this concept as well: http://jstimpfle.de/projects/wsl/main.html http://jstimpfle.de/projects/wsl/main.html And I guess you could count HTML in, too.
- stevelosh 9y agoCommon Lisp doesn't have it built in, but the cl-interpol library adds this (and you can add your own custom delimiters too). http://weitz.de/cl-interpol/#syntax http://weitz.de/cl-interpol/#syntax
- kazinator 9y agoPostScript! It uses (...) for strings. Nesting string literals without escaping is a somewhat poor concept, though. Firstly, what does that even mean? Given `abc `def' ghi', what is the string here? Is it abc def ghi or is it abc `def' ghi? Secondly, what if I want to just have an unbalanced ` character in the string data?
- kazinator 9y ago> 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 of a habit acquired from working with TeX. In TeX, it is the source code syntax for encoding quotes. Of course, it is lexically analyzed and converted to proper typesetting. > If you can use only ASCII’s typewriter characters, then use the apostrophe character (0x27) as both the left and right quotation mark (as in 'quote'). It looks like shit in any font in which the apostrophe is a little nine, which is historically correct. What you want is a little "six" on one side and a "nine" on the other, or at least some approximation thereof. Even if the apostrophe is crappily rendered as a little vertical notch, it still pairs with a backwards-slanted `. (The representation of apostrophe as a little vertical notch, I suspect, caters to literals in programming languages.) > If you can use Unicode characters ... then you should still stick to ASCII unless you have other good reasons to. ``Can'' is not the same thing as ``should'', let alone ``must''. > For example, 0x60 and 0x27 look under Windows NT 4.0 with the TrueType font Lucida Console (size 14) like this: The idea that people should change their behavior because of which font is default on the Windows cmd.exe console is laughable.
- Freak_NL 9y ago> 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.
- kazinator 9y agoAll sorts of reasons. Diagnostic printf message in some embedded firmware. Do you need to drag Unicode into it? Git log message. Ditto.
- mxfh 9y agoto 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 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
- mark-r 9y agoThose should be added to the document, with a note that they are NOT quotes!
- mxfh 9y agoI doubt this will ever be updated, since it's reference for a very specific, 20 year old, code interpretation related proposal und not meant for type setting. But for anything related to contemporary typesetting on the web I recommend Practical Typography and especially the Type Composition chapter: http://practicaltypography.com/type-composition.html#links http://practicaltypography.com/type-composition.html#links Including notes on quotes and apostrophes: http://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.html http://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.htm... http://practicaltypography.com/apostrophes.html http://practicaltypography.com/apostrophes.html
- alanh 9y agoHmm. I was going to link the classic https://alistapart.com/article/emen https://alistapart.com/article/emen (and I guess I just did), but I noticed a disclaimer at the top pointing out that it “is now obsolete.” And how! It proclaims that not enough text editors support UTF-8 yet, which thankfully hasn’t been true in ages
- timb07 9y agoAnd further confusion: An ʻokina (U+02BB, as found in "Hawaiʻi") is neither an apostrophe nor a left quotation mark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina
- dmitriid 9y agoIt's worse for other languages. Russian quotation marks are « and ». Thanks to early computers being predominantly from/designed in the US, they are now highjacked by American quotes. Same probably goes for French and other languages with their own sets of quotation marks.
- ansgri 9y ago«Russian» quotation marks are actually the « French » ones with different spacing. There's another, less used set of quotes in Russian, so called „German“ ones (used as inner quotes and in handwriting). English quotes are widely accepted though.
- contingencies 9y agoModern Chinese usage includes all of 《》〈〉「」『』【】“” and probably others, roughly in that order. Modern typographic convention is perhaps 《title》「quote」 but that's surely opine and debatable. Hong Kong and Taiwan have their own typesetting conventions, distinct from mainland China, and in the latter case no doubt influenced by Japanese occupation and cultural inflow (manga, etc.). Historically for most of Chinese history written language had no punctuation, and sentence endings were merely inferred from context, which was historically clearer 也. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9F#Definitions https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9F#Definitions (definition #4)
- gumby 9y agoI 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 (<< and >>) though not the secondary guillemots (quotation characters < and >) none of which are used in German text. And of course I used ascii analogues to type these into HN :-(
- YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 9y ago>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).
- gumby 9y agoI'm using a travel laptop on a plane and it came with a US keyboard
- lisper 9y agoThe 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 about whether or not the system I'm going to send that string to is going to "helpfully" remove the backslashes, in which case I need to write: "This is a string containing an embedded \\"quoted\\" string" God help you if you want to go two levels deep. All this horrible complexity could have been avoided if we could just write: «This is a string containing an «embedded» quoted string» Alas.
- agumonkey 9y agolet's rewrite social idioms to use < > as quotes.
- Symbiote 9y ago«These characters» are the usual way of quoting in several languages. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillemet
- Pxtl 9y agoWell then it's a good thing c used its ASCII equivalent that's accessible on anglophone keyboards for bit shifting and so if any programming language tried to use <<strings>> you'd have c grognards screaming about lshift and rshift.
- eesmith 9y agoThe 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_delimiters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_literal#Paired_delimite... points out that PostScript and Tcl have a string literal which allows matched quotes. PostScript: (The quick (brown fox)) Tcl: {The quick {brown fox}}
- rdtsc 9y ago> The Unix m4 macro processor is probably the only widely used tool that uses the `quote' combination as part of its input syntax; however, even that could be modified via changequote. I remember staring for a long time at the file when I first saw an m4 macro. My brain was telling, surely this has go to be a typo, but then everything worked as expected. Then I learned that's a proper way of quoting there.
- exikyut 9y agoFor reference, the BIOS text-mode font included with some IBM PCs (I've observed this on NetVistas and ThinkPads myself, at least) renders ` as a nice-looking opening quote, and ' looks like a nice closing quote.
- audiodude 9y agoHonestly I've been seeing `quote' in bash and other CLIs for my entire career and always thought they were just funny or strange, but carried no meaning.
- ttepasse 9y agoThe usage of of an accent as syntax in markup and programming languages annoys me to no end. And it will still be used, to this day, the latest example are template string in Javascript. • It is semantically idiotic because it's an accent, not a character. • It is visually annoying because you almost can't see the thing. • It is bad for usability, because on non-US keyboards the accents are implemented as dead keys. Yes, accent + space gives you the character but that's really unintuitive for people who grew up expecting accents only over letters.
- evincarofautumn 9y agoSame, I’ve never cared for it. For these reasons I’ve decided to take a stand and avoid using the grave accent for anything in a programming language I’m working on. Same goes for the dollar sign, because it’s somewhat Americentric, and as a currency character it doesn’t have any great semantic or mnemonic value except for, well, currency units. I guess you could argue for $trings (BASIC) or $calars (Perl) if you have $igils, but I don’t. Sacrificing these bits of ASCII is fine by me, because the language is small enough, and I also allow Unicode. For example, curved quotes are allowed and can be nested or contain ASCII quotes without escaping: // Character literals ‘'’ = '\'' // Text literals “Some "text" with “curved quotes”.” = "Some \"text\" with “curved quotes”." For the sake of usability, of course, everything in the core language & standard library has an ASCII spelling, like in Perl6. I’d like for other languages to adopt this view as well. If new languages allow proper Unicode notation in some sensible places, then programming editors’ input methods will catch up, e.g., automatically replacing “->” with “→” or “\theta” with “θ” (like Emacs’ TeX input mode). Also, does anyone know of a reference for keyboard layouts from around the world that includes estimates of the number of people using them? I’ve tried to keep things relatively easy to type on all the major layouts I know of, but I don’t want to alienate anyone if I can help it.
- int_19h 9y ago> Same goes for the dollar sign, because it’s somewhat Americentric, and as a currency character it doesn’t have any great semantic or mnemonic value except for, well, currency units. By that metric, wouldn't & be too Anglo-centric, and # be too Euro-centric? There are layouts out there on which neither is readily available.
- 13of40 9y agoCSB: 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, but I piped up and said maybe we should just make the language treat all of those characters like apostrophes and quotes.... I think around version 5 they finally made an API for doing proper anti-injection escaping because you pretty much needed a PhD to get it right due to all of the variations introduced by the extended characters.
- alanh 9y agoWhile I can’t expect many to follow suit, I myself often type educated quotes and nice apostrophes. The macOS keyboard combinations (nearly-intuitive combinations of Option-(Shift)-[ and -] for “”‘’) have long been committed to muscle memory. And since nearly all (web) file formats seem to be UTF-8, the days of manually typing “ and friends are long, long gone. Benefits of typing and using typographer’s quotes directly in your JS/JSON/HTML/source: 1. No backslashes or other escape sequences needed! 2. WYSIWYG 3. Retina screens and gorgeous modern fonts mean that your sloppy quotes will look extra bad if you just use ASCII quotes
- jrochkind1 9y agoMRI ruby still does this in some error messages. I hate it. Always messing up my copy-and-paste into `` markdown too.
- jiggunjer 9y agoSo why isn't there a straight single quotation, but there is a straight double quotation? I get it probably arose from compatibility reasons, but nowadays Unicode should be able to offer something? P.S. Major coincide I was googling this very question yesterday?
- mirimir 9y agoIn another life, I analyzed enterprise data. Variation in quotation marks was a common problem. I mean, is it "D'arcy" or "D’arcy"? Sometimes, I think, people would mangle data in spreadsheets, with auto-correct on.
- sengork 9y agoThings become really fun when you're trying to figure out why that command fails when you've copy/pasted it from another application window. Often it's the quotes which have been silently (automatically) converted to a visually similar (but functionally incompatible) character variant.
- timb07 9y agoIt's a little bit off-topic since the article was primarily about quotation marks and coding, but it would have been good if it mentioned that an ʻokina (as found in "Hawaiʻi") is neither an apostrophe nor a left quotation mark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOkina
- jimmies 9y agoI 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 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.
- jiggunjer 9y agoWhat bothers me about Unicode isn't that apostrophe (U+0027) is overloaded by having two semantic meanings ("apostrophe" or "single straight quote"), but that they exacerbate the confusion by recommending to overload "right single quote" (U+2019) to also mean apostrophe. We now have two characters for apostrophe and extra ambiguity for processing correct right single quotes. Great job not breaking historical documents Unicode.
- Loic 9y agoAnd now, imagine that your own name has an apostrophe in it. Like my family name. I can tell you, I crashed many databases and in 90% of the cases where people need to find again my name in a database, it is ending up with requesting my address because each time a different character is put by the clerk doing the data entry and they cannot match my name. Even state level authorities are bad, really bad, at it.
- Tepix 9y agoIt seems that half of the people in this company use the wrong acute sign `as an apostrophe instead of ' or ’. Unfortunately it's the half that creates presentations and talks to customers. It looks terrible and to me it's a disgrace! Example: it`s versus it's or it’s. (first one is wrong).
- ygra 9y agoI've seen a café which had its name written in large, lit letters on the façade and it included the following gem: Cafe`. Yes, the wrong accent, and not even combined. Easy access to DTP tools (or even a word processor) for the typographically uneducated masses ends up with quite painful results sometimes.
- crottypeter 9y agoCould do with a (2007) suffix.