Convert those dastardly curly quotes to straight quotes on Windows?

He who is harry newton said on Mon, 9 Oct 2017 09:42:43 +0000 (UTC):

I'm working on why that multiple-search-and-replace syntax failed.

The "help" inside of "vi" brings up syntax constraints:
:help /\%x

\%d123 Matches the character specified with a decimal number. Must be
followed by a non-digit.

\%o40 Matches the character specified with an octal number up to 0377.
Numbers below 040 must be followed by a non-octal digit or a non-digit.

\%x2a Matches the character specified with up to two hexadecimal
characters.

\%u20AC Matches the character specified with up to four hexadecimal
characters.

\%U1234abcd Matches the character specified with up to eight hexadecimal
characters.

Fantastic advice on this web page for changing curly quotes to straight
quotes!

In VIM:
The "66" curly quotes showed up as ~S, ^S, [147], Hex 93, Octal 223
The "99" curly quotes showed up as ~T, ^T, [148], Hex 94, Octal 224

When I ran a global search & replace on each, it works fine no matter
whether I use the hex, octal, or decimal sequence.

Escape:%s/\%d147/"/g
Escape:%s/\%d148/"/g

But when I put them together into one command, the syntax is wrong:
Escape:%s/[x,y]/z/g == search for x and/or y and replace with z

That syntax above is correct, so I don't yet know why this below fails.
Escape:%s/[\%d147,\%d148]/"/g

He who is Mayayana said on Mon, 9 Oct 2017 01:26:05 -0400:

I stand by my statement. It's true that there are various
unicode versions, but the only ones that anyone is likely to
encounter are UTF-8 in webpages and unicode-16 in computer
files. Windows runs on unicode-16, which is not UTF-16 but
rather a 2-byte-per-character system.

This says that we can set the encoding within Windows vi:
https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/13379/how-to-interpret-ascii-codes-returned-by-ga-command

For example:
:set encoding=cp1252 -- tells vim to use Windows-1252 character encoding
:set coding=utf-8 -- tells vim to return to UTF-8 encoding

Nonetheless, I finally found a simple and efficient solution using the
familiar search and replace command on decimal characters d147 & d148.

For some reason, the multiple syntax of [\%d,\%d] failed, but I found
another way to do multiple search and replace by using the paste method of
[control+-q+-x,control+-q+-y] instead.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2017/10/09/solved.jpg

Here is a testcase:
Good: (") == straight quotes
Good: (") == straight quotes
Good: (") == straight quotes
Bad: (+IBw-)(+IB0-) == curly quotes
Bad: (+IBw-)(+IB0-) == curly quotes
Bad: (+IBw-)(+IB0-) == curly quotes

Here is a summary of the background of the solution:
Typing "ga":
The '66' curly quotes show up as ~S, ^S, [147], Hex 93, Octal 223
The '99' curly quotes show up as ~T, ^T, [148], Hex 94, Octal 224

Typing \%d147 & \%d148 works alone but not in a dual search:
:s/\%d147/"/g == replaces all '66' curly quotes with straight quotes
:s/\%d148/"/g == replaces all '99' curly quotes with straight quotes
But they don't work together for some reason:
:s/[x,y]/z/g == works fine to replace x and/or y with z throughout the file
:s/[\%d147,\%d148]/"/g == fails to replace for every line of the file

Likewise:
:s/x\|y/z/g == works fine to replace x and/or y with z throughout the file
:s/\%d147\|\%d148/"/g == fails to replace for every line of the file

Typing "vy" will copy the non-printing character into the vi register.
Control +- V +- [char] = paste works on Linux (use Control+-Q for Windows)
:%s/[control+-v+-147,control+-v+-148]/"/g == replaces with straight quotes on Linux
:%s/[control+-q+-147,control+-q+-148]/"/g == replaces with straight quotes on Windows

So the solution turns out to be a simple multiple search & replace.
http://wetakepic.com/images/2017/10/09/solved.jpg

--
The only thing I don't understand is why the [x,y] syntax failed.

On 09/10/17 20:08, harry newton wrote:
He who is Char Jackson said on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 03:26:56 -0500:

I would only point out that no one suggested you replace your editor
with Notepad. You know that, right?

At first, I was hoping that MS Word or Notepad could be used as an
"intermediary" temporary file - but even they didn't save the output in a
pure-text format, at least not in my tests of saving MS Word as
"unformatted" and my tests saving Notepad as "UTF-8" text.

As Mayayana said, you have to know a lot about encoding to figure out why,
so, I gave up on that approach once the obvious tests each failed.

The *efficient* answer is for me to simply concentrate on one thing and on
that one thing only, which is to learn how to tell vi how to recognize a
decimal [146] or decimal [148] which are apparently the encoding for the
opening and closing curly quotes.

As for the rest of it, I think what you're saying is that you've fully
memorized the keyboard commands to do the tasks that you routinely want
to do, and that's fine, but it's equally fine for the rest of us to
point out that your chosen text editor is far from perfect.

I don't think there is anyone on this planet who can safely assert that
common text-editing tasks aren't more efficient in the core text editors
(e.g., vi, emacs, nano, atom, etc.) than they are in the behemoth editors
(such as MS Word).

I just googled "most efficient text editors" and it seems this discussion
of which is the "most efficient" of text editors is an endless discussion -
but - the point is that Microsoft products will *never* be on those lists.

What is the most efficient TextEditor ...
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-mo...-compiling-why


One reason, of course, is that the efficient editors are born on Linux:
https://www.maketecheasier.com/linux-text-editors/
5 Best Linux Text Editors
1. Vim
2. Emacs
3. Geany
4. Gedit
5. Sublime

While that's a Linux hit (and while I'd only consider the top two), the
most important point is their first sentence: "Debates on which one is the
best have been going on for years. Everyone has an opinion; everyone has a
favorite, a certain one they absolutely swear by."

So we will just have to agree to disagree in that I assert that vi is
generally on top of the short list of the most efficient "pure text"
editors extant on Windows.
If anyone else asserts that Notepad or MS Windows (or any other behemoth
editor) is more efficient, I'm not going to argue with them for more than a
post or two - since this is an age-old debate sort of along the lines of
whether iOS or Android or Mac or Windows is better.

You've shown
us that. So what's most interesting to me is that in many other aspects
of your computing life, you go on endless quests to find the best
freeware to do a specific task, but in this case you saddle yourself
with a tool that's clearly not up to the task, but a tool that you are
intimately familiar with. Very interesting.

You are astutely correct in that I consider myself a freeware expert.
That means I find the "best" freeware for the tasks that I do most.

For me, the definition of "best" pure text editor is an editor that most
efficiently edits pure text.
One thing about me is I'm a bare-bones kind of guy. I'm KISS if nothing
else.

Part of your problem, I suspect, is that you haven't yet noticed that
Notepad and Notepad++ are two entirely different editors. The latter is
what you need.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

In message , harry newton
writes:
He who is J. P. Gilliver (John) said on Sun, 8 Oct 2017 16:58:57 +0100:

Word does that (by default - you can turn it off); if I type "Fred",
it will convert the quotes into the 66 and 99 form (I think it calls
them "smart quotes"). [I think it does the same with single quotes,
'Fred'.] You can stop it doing it either by turning off the setting,
or on a one-off basis by doing an Undo (Ctrl-Z) immediately after
typing the ".
I wouldn't be surprised if some web-page editing software behaves
similarly.

I tried Word ... and failed.

I was hoping I could paste into MS Word 2007 to have Word automatically
remove the curly quotes, replacing them with keyboard quotes (aka ASCII
quotes).

No, AFAIK (without macros anyway, about which I know as near nothing as
makes no difference), it can't _remove_ the directional quotes. Its
default setting is to _create_ them as you type.

This article shows how to turn off the Microsoft Word default to convert
keyboard quotes into "smart quotes" (aka curly quotes).
https://support.office.com/en-us/art...tes-to-straigh
t-quotes-and-vice-versa-017963A0-BC5F-486B-9C9D-0EC511A8FB8F

I haven't looked at it, but wow, a whole article? For the 2003 version:
Tools, AutoCorrect Options ..., AutoFormat As You Type, untick the top
box ("Straight quotes" with "smart quotes"). I can't imagine it's much
different for other versions.
[]
Since I don't know MS Word all that well I wonder aloud whether MS Word can
convert curly quotes to keyboard quotes.

If Microsoft Word can convert curly quotes to keyboard quotes, the issue
would be solved instantly.

Does anyone know if Word can convert those curly quotes to keyboard quotes?
http://wetakepic.com/images/2017/10/09/smartquotes2.jpg

(I note the help also offers:

Note You can find and replace all instances of single or double curly
quotes with straight quotes in your document. To do this, clear the
"Straight quotes" with "smart quotes" check box on the AutoFormat As You
Type tab. On the Edit menu, click Replace. In both the Find what and
Replace with boxes, type ' or ", and then click Find Next or Replace
All.

I haven't tried this. Note it says put ' or "" in _both_ boxes, i. e.
tell it to replace " with " - I grant that would _not_ have occurred to
me!)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Parkinson: "What caused your conversion to women - was it the love of a good
one?" George Melly: "No the love of several bad ones" (Lizbuff in UMRA
'01-4-25)

In message , harry newton
writes:
He who is Char Jackson said on Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:22:09 -0500:

The reason I'm using GVIM on Windows is that vi allows for quick edits.
I tried to use Google to find "gvim quick edits" and came up empty.
What
does GVIM do that other text editors don't do? What are quick edits? I
assume those two words don't have their obvious meaning, because every
text editor does that, so what is it?

I apologize. My words were not clear. Hence I caused unnecessary
confusion.
I appreciate that you followed the implied meaning of my words, which makes
it my fault for not explaining that "vi" is all I ever wanted. GVIM just
came with the package when I searched for the best "vi" editor on Windows.

I never use the GUI in GVIM. I never use the mouse. Both hands are on the
keyboard, because all I do with GVIM is use the "vi" part of VIM.
So what I meant by "quick edits" was my own concoction of words to describe
that fact that I can cut and paste and copy and rename and delete and
reorder, etc., all using keyboard presses.

For example, I can delete a line by typing "dd" and I can yank a line by
typing "yy" and I can paste those deleted or yanked lines ten lines lower
by typing "p" after jumping down ten lines with "10j" such that the
self-concocted phrase "quick edits" means something like this sequence:

yy10jp == this is a "quick edit" yanking a line to place it 10 lines lower

Just out of curiosity: do you _ever_ use Ctrl-C, X, and V? Or
highlighting to select (which can be done from the keyboard - I usually
do - rather than the mouse)?

(Also: the above would move an individual line. How easy is it to move,
say, a sentence, that starts in the middle of a line and ends in the
middle of the next line - to a position in the middle of another line?)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'evidence'. Professor Edzart Ernst, prudential
magazine, AUTUMN 2006, p. 13.

In message , harry newton
writes:
[]
The problem is that whatever we want to call "pure text" editors don't
see the quotes.

Notepad isn't even close to a "real" text editor, so if anyone proposes
it, I have to state WHY I think Notepad is brain dead in editing
functionality compared to what an actual powerful text editor does.

You may not be aware, but there are several (all freeware AFAIK)
alternatives to NotePad, but several of these have names like Notepad+
or Notepad++. Some of the people "proposing" in this thread have been
actually suggesting those, and you may not have noticed the +s. (Though
I _think_ all of them, though they use single-byte-per-character, _do_
allow use of the upper 128 characters, so not "pure text" editors in
your sense - but they have improved text handling capabilities compared
to the basic Notepad that comes with Windows.)

Since GVIM obviously isn't working for you, I don't understand the
reluctance to find something that does.

The *only* reason I use vi day in and day out, every second of every
day, is that the editing of text is phenomenally efficient.
No mouse needed. No GUI needed. Just pure editing of text.

For example, I can edit all the first instances of "this" to replace
them with "that" in every line of the file in a split second without
moving my hands off the keyboard (which is the main point - efficiency).
:%s/this/that

I remember using EMACS (I think it was), and liked it a lot - the
variations on s/x/y/ in particular. [IIRR the version I used used "g"
rather than "%s", at the _beginning_, to mean "global within the file".]
However, I have also similar "muscle memory" to you for how to do things
in various other editors (and word processors): if you opened and learnt
some of them, you _might_ find that some of them _are_ as efficient.
(The need to keep going into and out of "edit mode" - I think your ":"
signifies which - _could_ be argued as an _in_efficiency of vi.)

[One of the editors I have muscle memory for is 1-word - the editor that
came with Xtree Gold; anyone else use that one? I still use it to edit
one file, the one from which my signature quotes get picked.]

I'm sure *every* text editor can replace just the first instance in
every line of "this" with "that"; but no editor will ever do this kind
of edit as efficiency as does a good text editor such as Emacs or vi or
whatever.

I share your reluctance, but do open your mind _a bit_. (Even to use of
the mouse: I _mostly_ use the keyboard when editing text [and other
things - I like IrfanView for handling images because I've got muscle
memory for many of its keyboard commands], but there _are_ times when I
find the mouse [or touchpad] quicker. Moving the edit point a _long_ way
[but to somewhere still on the screen], for example.)

Notepad will *never* be in the list of good text editors when it comes
to efficiently doing the things that you do thousands of times each and
every day. It just won't. Neither will MS Word. Nor Open Office.
Good "pure" text editors exist for a reason, and that's efficiency.
Notepad is garbage for text editing. Sorry to say this so bluntly.

See above - both the existence of Notepad clones, and the bit about
opening up _a little bit_. The _combination_ of _you_ and vi _is_ very
efficient - but don't close your mind to the possibility that other
people may be _as_ efficient with _their_ now intuitive use of other
editors. (Word/OO are for a different _purpose_.)

I can't imagine what Notepad even does, that MS Word doesn't already
do, except that it's free (sort of) and MS Word isn't free.

I didn't mean to dis Notepad; I'm just explaining that it's not
efficient as a text editor compared to vi efficiency in edits.

See above re Notepad "clones" (though they're not really clones, as they
all contain enhancements of one sort or another). Though I think even
the basic Notepad _does_ have a global replace (possibly only from a
certain version of Windows on).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'evidence'. Professor Edzart Ernst, prudential
magazine, AUTUMN 2006, p. 13.

On Mon, 9 Oct 2017 16:07:48 +1100, Peter Moylan
wrote:

On 09/10/17 03:06, Mayayana wrote:

The result is millions of people who equate their computer with MS
Office and assume the whole world also uses MS Office. They're the
people who send emails from Word or send a 60,000 byte DOC file to
communicate 1 sentence of 24 bytes.

One of our previous university Vice-Chancellors used to send out "all
staff" memos using MS-Word. There were times when his one-paragraph memo
became a 2 MB e-mail, sent to over a thousand recipients. With the
hardware of the day that probably put significant stress on the mail server.

Why as much as 2 MB for a short memo? Because apparently he didn't know
how to create a new MS-Word document, so he would take an existing
document, delete its content, and then type the new text. What he didn't
realise was that, with an unfortunate choice of options (it might even
be the default choice), the document contains a record of all changes.
This became obvious to those of us who didn't have MS-Word installed and
had to read the raw data.

What also became obvious was that he was leaking some very confidential
data.

Different software, but a similar effect -

There was a now-notorious doctor in England, Harold Shipman, who
murdered many of his older patients.

Part of the evidence against him was obtained from the computer he used
in the course of his work. He used standard software to keep patients'
medical records. After killing a patient he would modify the entries in
the patient's records to be consistent with a natural death.

He was a enthusiast for the use of computers for medical records
However, he was unaware that the software kept a journal, an 'audit
trail', of all changes to the records. Those activities were
date-stamped. Even if he had put a false date in the visible record the
journal recorded when the change had actually been made.

http://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/shipman-harold.htm

Shipman had urged families to cremate their relatives in a large
number of cases, stressing that no further investigation of their
deaths was necessary, even in instances where these relatives had
died of causes previously unknown to the families. In situations
where they did raise questions, Shipman would provide computerised
medical notes that corroborated his cause of death pronouncements.

Police later established that Shipman would, in most cases, alter
these medical notes directly after killing the patient, to ensure
that his account matched the historical records. What Shipman had
failed to grasp was that each alteration of the records would be
time stamped by the computer, enabling police to ascertain exactly
which records had been altered.


From the report of the official inquiry[1] into the matter:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.g...e/pdf/vol1.pdf

4.45 During the course of their investigations, the police
discovered, by means of the audit trail facility, that Shipman had
falsified the computerised records of a number of patients; he had
made additions to those records in order to create a medical history
which would explain the death. In the case of Mrs Bianka Pomfret,
for example, some entries in her computerised records, apparently
dated several months before her death, were found to have been added
on the day she died so as to provide a plausible explanation for her
death, which Shipman certified as having been caused by coronary
thrombosis due to ischaemic heart disease.

[1] That was an official Inquiry after the trial and conviction of
Shipman. The aim, as with all such Inquiries is, to see what lessons can
be learned and to recommend changes in procedures and, if necessary, law
in the matters of prevention, detection and investigation. Such
inquiries are headed by judges and the proceedings are in public.

--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

In message , harry newton
writes:
[]
The *efficient* answer is for me to simply concentrate on one thing and on
that one thing only, which is to learn how to tell vi how to recognize a
decimal [146] or decimal [148] which are apparently the encoding for the
opening and closing curly quotes.

Does it accept the Alt-plus-NumPad method of entering characters (in
Windows)?
Try this in Notepad first, to see how it works:

0. Ensure the Num Lock light is on.
1. Press _and hold down_ the Alt key.
2. Type some digits - on the numeric pad, _not_ the top row of keys.
3. Release the Alt key.
(It's a lot smoother than it sounds.)

Sad, I know, but I had actually memorised the codes for several
characters I used a lot: 0177 IIRR for plus-or-minus ±, 0215 for
multiply ×, 0176 and 0186 for degrees and raised o ° º (though I can
never remember which is which), 230 for micro μ. (Note that a lot of
those start with a zero, which _is_ needed.)

[This is fine if you _have_ a numeric pad. Since my default machine is
this netbook which doesn't, I now use Allchars which generates them by
two-character sequences that are fairly intuitive - +- for the
plus-or-minus, "o for o umlaut ö, and so on.]

Anyway, this might be a ways to get these characters into your vi s/x/y/
string, since you now know their codes; try it. (Try with and without
the leading zero.)

As for the rest of it, I think what you're saying is that you've fully
memorized the keyboard commands to do the tasks that you routinely want
to do, and that's fine, but it's equally fine for the rest of us to
point out that your chosen text editor is far from perfect.
[]
While that's a Linux hit (and while I'd only consider the top two), the
most important point is their first sentence: "Debates on which one is the
best have been going on for years. Everyone has an opinion; everyone has a
favorite, a certain one they absolutely swear by."

Including you of course (-:

So we will just have to agree to disagree in that I assert that vi is
generally on top of the short list of the most efficient "pure text"
editors extant on Windows.
[]
You are astutely correct in that I consider myself a freeware expert.
That means I find the "best" freeware for the tasks that I do most.

For me, the definition of "best" pure text editor is an editor that most
efficiently edits pure text.

See previous post, that just _perhaps_ you've got "muscle memory" for
some of the _in_efficiencies of vi? Not that I'm suggesting you change -
I was the same over Windows 98 (and still use XP in preference to 7).

One thing about me is I'm a bare-bones kind of guy. I'm KISS if nothing
else.

If someone thinks Notepad is the most efficient freeware for making
constant and complex edits to hundreds of "puretext" files a day, then
maybe Notepad has something that I don't know about.
See previous post re alternative Notepads (plus above about your "muscle
memory").
I don't know everything there is to know about freeware.
I'm always learning.
But less open than you once were. (I know; I am too.)

So maybe Notepad is far more efficient than vi is.

Now, now - nobody ever claimed that.

But then why can't I find Notepad yet on any list of the most efficient
text editors (at least not in my cursory search just now)?
Probably (a) because it clearly isn't (b) the sort of people who vote on
such things may include a lot of vi/emacs enthusiasts. (Actually, I
doubt there's anything as democratic as a _vote_ anyway: virtually all
such lists will be one person's view.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'evidence'. Professor Edzart Ernst, prudential
magazine, AUTUMN 2006, p. 13.

In message , Mayayana
writes:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| I think I also vaguely remember some printers being settable to print
| the pound sign (by which I do _not_ mean #) when you told them to print
| a $. (I don't think that was ever very popular, because among other
| things $ was used a lot in programming languages then, and listings with
| a lot of pound signs in them were confusing to say the least.)

That's an interesting point. As far as I know all programming
languages are still in American English. I have the luxury of not
noticing until I download sample code from someone foreign
and see all the function names and keywords in English, but
with incomprehensible variable names. Like this snippet:

For i = 1 To MengeZeilen
ReDim Zeilenbuffer(ZL - 1)
CopyMemory Zeilenbuffer(0), Buffer(Bufferstand + 1), ZL

Seeing that I realize how hard it must be for foreigners
to learn programming. The language of the variable names
is apparently German, which makes it very difficult for me
to figure out what the code is doing, even though I understand
the function names, keywords and operators.


Of course, the German had to just learn the codewords For, To, ReDim,
CopyMemory, and Buffer, without even having the advantage of them being
in _his_ language. (I think "Zeil" means "character". A little German is
useful!)


4
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep
enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?" - Jean Kerr

In message , harry newton
writes:
He who is Mayayana said on Mon, 9 Oct 2017 01:29:50 -0400:
(Can you drop the "He who is"?)

If I remember correctly, that's also how the creator
of the Melissa virus got caught.

Yikes. Is my name in the MS Word document I already uploaded?
http://www.filedropper.com/fixquote
[]
Even so, your point is still valid that a name can be in the file.

Is my name in my Word file?

It probably put the author's name in, yes. What it thinks the author's
name is is set during the setup of Word (may be changeable, I don't
know); if you just accepted the defaults at that point, it will have
extracted the information from your Windows setup, so it depends what
you entered when you installed Windows (or first ran it, if it was
preinstalled).

To see if your Word doc. contains your name, just load it into a hex
editor, or even vi of it'll take it (if it's the modern .docx format,
you'd need to open it with a .zip handler - if you haven't got one,
rename it from .docx to .zip and use the built-in one - and extract the
various files it contains). The relevant string may appear with
intervening bytes, such as h.a.r.r.y. .n.e.w.t.o.n (the intervening
character may display as something else, depending on what you're using
to view the file, but will be the same).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep
enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?" - Jean Kerr

"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.

"harry newton" wrote

| Nonetheless, I finally found a simple and efficient solution using the
| familiar search and replace command on decimal characters d147 & d148.
|

And that works? Your link is talking about ANSI replacments,
replacing 147 and 148 with 34. It's not common for people to be
using those in ANSI text because they'll be corrupted in a non-
English codepage. Since you're copying from webpages I'm
assuming that you're dealing with UTF-8. But if your method
works then....

"harry newton" wrote

| Yikes. Is my name in the MS Word document I already uploaded?
| http://www.filedropper.com/fixquote
|
Beats me. The site won't let me download without an account.
Are you really serious? You need to get a less obnoxious place to
store files. If you don't have anything like your own website or
private space, you can probably use dropbox. I find that links
from there work fine for direct download if I just change the
parameter dl=0 to dl=1.

| Is my name in my Word file?
|

If it's a DOCX rename it to .ZIP and open it. Extract
all the files, then use that famous VIM jack-of-all-trades
to search for your name. You might also do a binary
search in a hex editor. But be warned: DOCX is a bloated
mess. I managed to find a DOCX on my system and looked at
it just now. No less than 10 XML files are contained in it.

In a DOC file the whole thing is stored as semi-binary.
The actual ext may be ANSI or unicode. They set it up
like a binary file, with sections. (It's a general type that
Microsoft refer to as a compound storage file.) I think
the personal data comes near the end and may include
local paths. I just opened an old Microsoft EULA DOC
in HxD hex editor and found this that doesn't appear in
the doc itself:
Christina Olson... Microsoft Word 10.

I've never used MS Office and only use Libre Office as
necessary for business contracts and such. So I'm not
familiar with how one cleans tracks.

"harry newton" wrote

| I don't study languages, but the Babylonians seemed to communicate
| perfectly well with such an arrangement of a small set of 26 fundamental
| characters.
|
| Why can't we be "allowed" to do the same?
|

And then what will you do when you need to type
a Euro sign, copyright, or other such symbol?

He who is Peter Moylan said on Mon, 9 Oct 2017 22:40:34 +1100:

Part of your problem, I suspect, is that you haven't yet noticed that
Notepad and Notepad++ are two entirely different editors. The latter is
what you need.

Ah, my mistake. You are correct.
I am publicly chastised and just as publicly contrite.

Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org/features/
* PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expression) Search/Replace

I've installed Notepad++ but I don't know anything about it yet.