Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 August 25

= August 25 =

Curly quote marks
I want to do a search&replace to change double curly quote marks to straight ones in the wikitext on the edit page of Wikipedia article. (Curly quote marks cause problems sometimes.) I have Windows 7 and my Toshiba laptop keyboard does not have curly quote marks, and I cannot form them by pressing Alt+0145, etc on the numerical keypad; I can only form them using the code &(plus)rdquo; and &(plus)ldquo;. (Ignore "plus" - "nowiki" is ineffective to stop the code converting here.) &(plus)#8221; does not work either. I tried using search&replace on the Advanced ribbon at the top of the edit page with the rdquo code, but it doesn't work (as I expected). Is there any other way I can find the curly quote marks in the edit text? --P123ct1 (talk) 09:46, 25 August 2014 (UTC)


 * If you find them in the text, you could try copying them and pasting them into the search field where you need them. I often do this for the ¢ symbol since I can never remember the code for it.  Dismas |(talk) 10:53, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, I have done it that way. --P123ct1 (talk) 12:58, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
 * If you don't mind an overkill solution, you can make and run an autohotkey script in the background and assign a keyboard shortcut to create the curly quotes. This page, http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/commands/Send.htm, covers the send command, it's fairly straightforward from there if you're familiar with programming - if not, I can help you put something together on my talk page, if you'd like. But, like I said, unless you are using these all the time, this may be overkill.Phoenixia1177 (talk) 15:43, 25 August 2014 (UTC)


 * What problems do curly quote marks cause? Your laptop keyboard almost certainly has some way to enable a numeric keypad overlay, which you could use to enter the keypad codes, though not very conveniently. If you're on Windows, you can use the Character Map utility: press Alt+V to enable Ad v anced view, Alt+E to S e arch, type "quotation" or just "quo" in the search box, press Enter, and double-click on the appropriate symbol, which will be automatically copied to the clipboard. View the source of my reply to see how to write &amp;rdquo; and the like in wikitext. Years ago I wrote an AutoHotkey script to generate non-ASCII characters from ASCII character sequences that I could remember easily, which I'll paste below for anyone who's interested. -- BenRG (talk) 17:58, 25 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Phoenixia1177: Thanks, I will look at that, but really I don't have to do this often enough to justify that solution. BenRG : Yes, that is what I was looking for. I haven't had Word 7 for long and haven't found my way around it yet. I still mourn the passing of XP Professional, which was so user-friendly. The curly quote marks can cause tremendous problems with footnotes, as I found out to my cost earlier today -  You will see from this why I wanted to find a simple way of getting rid of them! --P123ct1 (talk) 01:01, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

The hotkey is Win+A (#a), which you can replace with whatever you want. The UnicodeKeys.utf.txt needs to be in the same directory as the script, and must be UTF-8 encoded (it's an option in Notepad's "Save as" dialog). Here's part of mine: [-a]ā ['a]á [`a]à [^a]â [:a]ä [oa]å [~a]ã [-A]Ā ['A]Á [`A]À [^A]Â [:A]Ä [OA]Å [~A]Ã [-e]ē ['e]é [`e]è [^e]ê [:e]ë [ae]æ [oe]œ [-E]Ē ['E]É [`E]È [^E]Ê [:E]Ë [AE]Æ [OE]Œ [-i]ī ['i]í [`i]ì [^i]î [:i]ï            [-I]Ī ['I]Í [`I]Ì [^I]Î [:I]Ï [-o]ō ['o]ó [`o]ò [^o]ô [:o]ö [~o]õ      [-O]Ō ['O]Ó [`O]Ò [^O]Ô [:O]Ö [~O]Õ [-u]ū ['u]ú [`u]ù [^u]û [:u]ü            [-U]Ū ['U]Ú [`U]Ù [^U]Û [:U]Ü [eth]ð [thorn]þ [,c]ç [~n]ñ [ss]ß        [Eth]Ð [Thorn]Þ [,C]Ç [~N]Ñ [ e]ɛ [ i]ɪ [ o]ɔ [ u]ʊ [sh]ʃ [v]ʌ [zh]ʒ

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[--]– [---]— [`]‘ [']’ [``]“ ['']” [...]… [cdots]⋯ [cent]¢ [lb]£ [pound]£ [euro]€ [yen]¥ [sec]§ [section]§ [copy]© [copyright]© [par]¶ [para]¶ [tm]™ [TM]™ [dag]† [dagger]† [ddag]‡ [ddagger]‡ [bullet]• [<-]← [->]→ [^-]↑ [v-]↓ [<->]↔ [=>]⇒ [<=>]⇔ [|->]↦ [mapsto]↦


 * Haven&t you ever seen problems with character encoding of non-ASCII characters? I?ll admit that I don't know how/why it&rsquos a problem, but it□s fairly common in my experience :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SemanticMantis (talk • contribs)
 * In some applications sure, but Wikipedia and all major browsers have supported Unicode for ages. But P123ct1 was talking about quotes in HTML syntax, which makes sense. -- BenRG (talk) 04:16, 26 August 2014 (UTC)