Smart Quotes?

[Yonkey]

- Just got done fighting with changing my sig... sheesh. Would have been a lot simpler if the forum kept quotes as plain old quotes instead of trying to "smart quote" them.

Peace & Luv, Liz

I notice it only does that when you copy and paste text from Word (or some equivalent text-editor that displays smart quotes).

[Jeysie]

I notice it only does that when you copy and paste text from Word (or some equivalent text-editor that displays smart quotes).

That's the thing. I thought that might be the case, so I tried retyping the quote marks, and it still did it.

Of course, now it has this thing where it's double line spacing between the paragraphs?

(sigh)

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

That's the thing. I thought that might be the case, so I tried retyping the quote marks, and it still did it.

Of course, now it has this thing where it's double line spacing between the paragraphs?

(sigh)

Peace & Luv, Liz

Whoa, your browser is doing this?  I've never had that happen to me before besides in Word.

[Yonkey]

I don't think so.  I can't do smart quotes at all unless I copy them from somewhere else.  

[Jeysie]

I don't think so.  I can't do smart quotes at all unless I copy them from somewhere else.  

How come so many posts on the forum apparently have encoded quotes and apostrophes, then?

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

I don't think so.  I can't do smart quotes at all unless I copy them from somewhere else.  

How come so many posts on the forum apparently have encoded quotes and apostrophes, then?

Peace & Luv, Liz

None of "my" posts have them. <- see

[Jeysie]

Actually, Yonkey, your quotes *are* encoded in that post... check this page's source code.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

It says:
<br />None of &quot;my&quot; posts have them. &lt;- see

If I used smart quotes, it would looke like:
These quotes are very “smart”. <-see

[Jeysie]

It says:
<br />None of &quot;my&quot; posts have them. &lt;- see

If I used smart quotes, it would looke like:
These quotes are very &#8220;smart&#8221;. <-see

Sorry, I got crossed up. I just meant, the forum has &quot; instead of simply " . (I have unencoded quotes on many of my webpages, and they display and validate just fine.) So when I put " in my sig block, the forum kept writing &quot; for them, and it sucked up all the "available characters" so the quote was getting cut off. (i.e. it was counting the letters in &quot; towards the character limit.) And that's what was causing me problems.

Edit: Interesting: Look what happened when I quoted your post.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

Ahh, now I see.  The reason the forum uses &quot; in places and " in others is because apostrophies and quotation marks are used in PHP a lot.  If you ever have them in a string you have to escape them.  

Then the forum stores the message into MySQL and since it doesn't use escape codes, it converts them to &quot;.  

As for the quote block, it seems to not recognize smart quote ASCII codes, same with the Search page's output.

[Jeysie]

Er, so unencoded quotes are OK in static HTML, but not OK in dynamic output? In HTML, you really only need to encode ampersands and angle brackets, which is why I got confused.

At any rate, it's sort of annoying/confusing that the forum counts the symbol encoding towards the sig character limit. Not to mention including the encoding in search page results output.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

Yeah, in most programming languages the " is a special character already used for string literals.  For example, lets say you had no quotes:

jeysieSignature = "I am a signature.";

But when you want to throw quotation marks in you'd get either:

jeysieSignature = "I am a signature.  But I also have &quot;quotes&quot;";

OR

jeysieSignature = "I am a signature.  But I also have \"quotes\"";

And like I said, all data (including signatures) is stored in a MySQL database, which doesn't understand that \" means display the quote so before storing it, the " turns into &quot;.

[Jeysie]

Ugh, no wonder I was always terrible at programming. Anytime you get into recursive nesting stuff like that my brain wants to explode. I like stuff linear and consistent.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

Hehe, it's not really recursive, it's just saying you can't use the " without escaping it first with a \.

[Jeysie]

Does that work in javascript? I have some document.write stuff where I was forced to resort to using double single quotes to fake the look of double quotes.

Peace & Luv, Liz

[Yonkey]

I think it works, I haven't really tried it myself.  If not, just use &quot; for quotation marks instead.