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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
How can we convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
http://i67.tinypic.com/2h5mjbr.jpg I like to save into TEXT files on Windows technical information cut and pasted from disjoint news articles where the unprintable curly quotes drive me nuts! Here is a screenshot of a sample cut and paste: http://i67.tinypic.com/2h5mjbr.jpg I tried cutting from the web and pasting into MS Word and then cutting from MS Word and pasting into the text file - but the dastardly curly quotes were still there. I tried using Google Gmail, pasting into a composition window and then hitting the "Tx" format text button, and even changing the font to some other font, but the dastardly curly quotes were still there. Since almost every technical web site uses the dastardly curly quotes, how can I just get *rid* of them using a Windows method so that I can have a text file that contains normal quotes? Here's just one sample but the web is filled with dastardly curly quotes! http://theverge.com/2017/10/6/16437790/iphone-8-swollen-battery-issue-apple-investigating |
#2
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
harry newton wrote:
How can we convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows? http://i67.tinypic.com/2h5mjbr.jpg I like to save into TEXT files on Windows technical information cut and pasted from disjoint news articles where the unprintable curly quotes drive me nuts! Here is a screenshot of a sample cut and paste: http://i67.tinypic.com/2h5mjbr.jpg I tried cutting from the web and pasting into MS Word and then cutting from MS Word and pasting into the text file - but the dastardly curly quotes were still there. I tried using Google Gmail, pasting into a composition window and then hitting the "Tx" format text button, and even changing the font to some other font, but the dastardly curly quotes were still there. Since almost every technical web site uses the dastardly curly quotes, how can I just get *rid* of them using a Windows method so that I can have a text file that contains normal quotes? Here's just one sample but the web is filled with dastardly curly quotes! http://theverge.com/2017/10/6/164377...ttery-issue-ap ple-investigating Copy the text to your text editor (or if already in a text file, open the file). Select a "curly quote", copy it. Replace all, paste the copied curly into the "find this" box, and then type a regular quote in the "replace it with this" box, replace all. Repeat for the "close curly quotes". -- You looking at my hog? Don't look at my hog... or my motorcycle. |
#3
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
He who is Auric__ said on Sat, 7 Oct 2017 22:57:53 -0000 (UTC):
Copy the text to your text editor (or if already in a text file, open the file). Select a "curly quote", copy it. Replace all, paste the copied curly into the "find this" box, and then type a regular quote in the "replace it with this" box, replace all. Repeat for the "close curly quotes". I should have mentioned that the curly quotes are just the tip of the iceberg, and even they have "opening" and "closing" curly quotes, and even then, they have "single" and "double" curly quotes ... and there's lots more of this "curly-quote" stuff, so cutting and pasting isn't even close to a solution. I'm looking for a program that just does away with all non-standard "us-ascii" characters that aren't on a typical American US English keyboard. The use model requested is: a. Copy dastardly *******ized text (which is most web pages) b. Paste into this Jesus program (which absolves all curly-quote sins) c. Then cut and paste out of that Jesus program into the text file or Usenet post. For more on those sinful dastard non-standard-character abominations, see: https://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.html https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/12/quotation-mark-wars/511766/ etc. Maybe this will work, but it's ponderous: https://support.office.com/en-us/art...D-0EC511A8FB8F |
#4
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
"harry newton" wrote
| Copy the text to your text editor (or if already in a text file, open the | file). Select a "curly quote", copy it. Replace all, paste the copied curly | into the "find this" box, and then type a regular quote in the "replace it | with this" box, replace all. Repeat for the "close curly quotes". | | I should have mentioned that the curly quotes are just the tip of the | iceberg, and even they have "opening" and "closing" curly quotes, and even | then, they have "single" and "double" curly quotes ... and there's lots | more of this "curly-quote" stuff, so cutting and pasting isn't even close | to a solution. | | I'm looking for a program that just does away with all non-standard | "us-ascii" characters that aren't on a typical American US English | keyboard. | I can't see your tinypic links. Apparently they require script. But I know what you mean. That also drives me crazy. It's an entirelty unnecessary complication. Auric's solution is the most realistic. I know there are different characters, but usually not many. Two kinds of curly quotes and unicode white space are the most common. There's no way to make a generic program to treat all possibilities because you're substituting ANSI characters for UTF-8. The possibilities go into the thousands. If you just save as ANSI and then replace anything funky, it's not too bad. Otherwise, you can just save the text file as UTF-8. I agree with you. There's no reason to use curly quotes. Using the ASCII versions means not needing to use UTF-8 encoding. If UTF-8 were really necessary it would be different, but most of the world lives by ANSI. And webpages in European languages work just fine with ANSI. Microsoft is one of the worst for that problem. They write pages intended for an English-speaking audience, in English, then use just a handful of unnecessary UTF-8 characters that break the ANSI continuity. It makes no sense. |
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
"Mayayana" on Sat, 7 Oct 2017 23:16:53 -0400
typed in alt.windows7.general the following: I agree with you. There's no reason to use curly quotes. Using the ASCII versions means not needing to use UTF-8 encoding. If UTF-8 were really necessary it would be different, but most of the world lives by ANSI. And webpages in European languages work just fine with ANSI. Microsoft is one of the worst for that problem. They write pages intended for an English-speaking audience, in English, then use just a handful of unnecessary UTF-8 characters that break the ANSI continuity. It makes no sense. IMOSHO, it makes no sense, but then it is Microsoft. Which often seem to have a lot of "I'm sure it makes sense - not to me, but to someone" elements. -- pyotr filipivich Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing? |
#6
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
"pyotr filipivich" wrote
|Microsoft is one of the worst for that | problem. They write pages intended for an English-speaking | audience, in English, then use just a handful of unnecessary | UTF-8 characters that break the ANSI continuity. It makes | no sense. | | IMOSHO, it makes no sense, but then it is Microsoft. Which often | seem to have a lot of "I'm sure it makes sense - not to me, but to | someone" elements. | That's a generous view. I don't see a problem with switching to UTF-8, but what MS are doing is to deliberately and unnecessarily break ASCII compatibility without any need to do so, by replacing quotes and spaces with unicode characters in UTF-8. It seems to be a kind of political correctness attitude. Nearly all English pages can easily be both ASCII and UTF-8. I wonder how journalists type those quotes. Maybe they have a software program that does the conversion? |
#7
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
He who is Mayayana said on Sat, 7 Oct 2017 23:16:53 -0400:
Auric's solution is the most realistic. I know there are different characters Since my Windows default text editor is VIM, I guess I could define macros. Like any VI user, I'm adept at global search-and-replace - but I'm not sure how to handle the non-printing characters in that search. I don't know what to look for but the search-and-replace command would look something like this, where "x" below indicates the unknown character sequence (which is probably a few keystrokes). %s/x/"/g Which means (offhand): % = for the whole file s = search each line / = for x = (this is where I'll need the character sequence for a curly quote) / = and replace it with " = literally the doublequote / = and do that g = every time you see it in each line Does anyone know offhand what the super secret character set is to type on a US American English Keyboard for the curly quotes? |
#8
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
"harry newton" wrote
| Does anyone know offhand what the super secret character set is to type on | a US American English Keyboard for the curly quotes? It's easy enough to look these things up. In fact I already mentioned them. Here's a sample that I found listed third at DDG searching for curly quotes in UTF-8. It's not a set of characters for typing curly quotes. It's 3 bytes that define a curly quote in UTF-8 but read as 3 characters in ANSI. And you can't type them. You don't seem to really be reading the information people are giving you. Why not look into the encoding? Why not switch to a better editor? (Global search and replace is not a rare animal.) But I expect you'll also find other issues if you want to keep that webpage text as ANSI. That's why it may not be the simple solution that you insist on finding. Sometimes spaces are done with UTF-8 character combinations. Things like a copyright sign will be different in UTF-8 vs ANSI. And so on. |
#9
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 21:38:03 +0000 (UTC) "harry newton"
wrote in article Since almost every technical web site uses the dastardly curly quotes, how can I just get *rid* of them using a Windows method so that I can have a text file that contains normal quotes? Curly quotes (dastardly) are "normal" quotes. The straight quotes were ASCII (and EBCDIC) excuses for "real" (dastardly, curly) quotes... |
#10
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
In message ,
Jason writes: On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 21:38:03 +0000 (UTC) "harry newton" wrote in article Since almost every technical web site uses the dastardly curly quotes, how can I just get *rid* of them using a Windows method so that I can have a text file that contains normal quotes? Curly quotes (dastardly) are "normal" quotes. The straight quotes were ASCII (and EBCDIC) excuses for "real" (dastardly, curly) quotes... They (the straight quotes) preceded ASCII and probably EBCDIC by quite some time - they're on my old Imperial typewriter ... -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf The thing about smut is it harms no one and it's rarely cruel. Besides, it's a gleeful rejection of the dreary and the "correct". - Alison Graham, RT 2014/10/25-31 |
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 00:12:05 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote: In message , Jason writes: On Sat, 7 Oct 2017 21:38:03 +0000 (UTC) "harry newton" wrote in article Since almost every technical web site uses the dastardly curly quotes, how can I just get *rid* of them using a Windows method so that I can have a text file that contains normal quotes? Curly quotes (dastardly) are "normal" quotes. The straight quotes were ASCII (and EBCDIC) excuses for "real" (dastardly, curly) quotes... They (the straight quotes) preceded ASCII and probably EBCDIC by quite some time - they're on my old Imperial typewriter ... Yes, that's because they use only a single key. Curly quotes (the normal quotes, as Jason said) would require two keys. |
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
He who is Ken Blake said on Sat, 07 Oct 2017 16:19:19 -0700:
Curly quotes (dastardly) are "normal" quotes. The straight quotes were ASCII (and EBCDIC) excuses for "real" (dastardly, curly) quotes... They (the straight quotes) preceded ASCII and probably EBCDIC by quite some time - they're on my old Imperial typewriter ... Yes, that's because they use only a single key. Curly quotes (the normal quotes, as Jason said) would require two keys. I stand completly humbled before you as I admit that curly quotes (and all that other sinful related stuff that isn't on a US American computer keyboard) came first, simply because, well, typography predates computers. OK. So curly stuff came first. I do admit that fact. But it's not just curly quotes. There's tons more stuff in web pages that just don't render in text. The curly quote is just the tip of the iceberg. All I want is so simple that I can't believe anyone wouldn't want it. I cut and paste web text into a text file as I research stuff. I just want all the pasted text to be visible characters, not black boxes. What program or method easily converts all that curly typography stuff to just the character set that ASCII Windows editors like Gvim use? |
#13
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
He who is Jason said on Sat, 7 Oct 2017 19:06:29 -0400:
Curly quotes (dastardly) are "normal" quotes. The straight quotes were ASCII (and EBCDIC) excuses for "real" (dastardly, curly) quotes... Depends on which side of the fence you live on. Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes? https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/12/quotation-mark-wars/511766/ But I was just using "curly quotes" as just one of maybe a dozen or more common dastardly abominations which just don't translate into text on Windows, as shown in this simple example from Butterick's Practical Typography: https://practicaltypography.com/index.html#toc Where curly quotes are just one of many evils: https://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.html The problem is that my text editor (Gvim) isn't handling the dastardly characters, so all I want to do is get rid of any character that any normal text editor can't/won't/doesn't handle. This ponderous Microsoft Office approach might work - but I'm hoping for a far simpler and less monotlithic solution to the basic problem that everyone should have if they cut and paste into text from the web. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Change-curly-quotes-to-straight-quotes-and-vice-versa-017963A0-BC5F-486B-9C9D-0EC511A8FB8F |
#14
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
In message , harry newton
writes: [] The problem is that my text editor (Gvim) isn't handling the dastardly characters, so all I want to do is get rid of any character that any normal text editor can't/won't/doesn't handle. [] Of course, some would (and will) say why are you using a text editor (probably inserting the word "still", to imply you're a dinosaur), but I _do_ see the problem, and like you am surprised that no-one has written a "simplify" utility that does what you want. (Or if they have, that no-one has mentioned it.) One _slight_ problem that might be encountered (though I would think it could be overcome): non-standardisation. I've encountered - I can't say in web pages, but I get it in emails/news posts that my elderly software doesn't display as the originator intended. For example, let's take those quotes you hate so much: sometimes, they've used something that my software _does_ render as (in my case sloping rather than curly) quotes; sometimes, they've used something that my software renders as some other character (superscripted 2 and 3 are common); and sometimes they've used something that just renders as a little rectangle, which is my software's way of showing "unknown character" or something. OK, you may say: the "simplify" utility could still handle this: it would just have to render _all_ those possibilities into a quote character (ASCII 34 decimal, "shifted 2" on some keyboards [as it's the code for "2" with a bit changed - though I don't think it _is_ shifted 2 on the US layout]). But the potential problem comes when one example - let's say font, though that's oversimplifying - uses code X for a quote (albeit sloping/curly), but another one uses the _same_ code X for something else: a space, say, or a ^, or %, or _. How would your "simplify" utility know which to substitute? (But as I've said, I'm sure it could be got over - perhaps by having it look at headers.) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation. - Humphrey Lyttelton quoted by Barry Cryer in Radio Times 10-16 November 2012 |
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Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?
On Sun, 8 Oct 2017 10:17:22 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote: In message , harry newton writes: [] The problem is that my text editor (Gvim) isn't handling the dastardly characters, so all I want to do is get rid of any character that any normal text editor can't/won't/doesn't handle. [] Of course, some would (and will) say why are you using a text editor (probably inserting the word "still", to imply you're a dinosaur), Using a text editor doesn't mean you're a dinosaur. Some of us occasionally do things like create/modify .bat files. |
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