Copy pasting code shared on slack, why do the apostrophe characters get converted into a different character that looks like an apostrophe?
It's like when you travel and you start to judge gas stations by their bathroom. Anyone who has traveled a lot knows exactly what I mean.
copy/paste worked more reliably 20 years ago than it does today. So much so that I've started judging software based upon their ability to reliably copy/paste. Seems stupid, right? Just like judging gas stations by their bathroom seems stupid to people who rarely go into them because they don't travel.
But it flat out amazes me how bad copy/paste is today.
I once spent _hours_ trying to figure out why a PHP script was shitting all over itself. It turns out I copy/pasted the email text from Monday.com and it copied non-printing characters that caused PHP to fall over.
Thing is, at that point, I was an old hand at that stupid crap, it didn't take me that long to find it. I learned years ago not to trust copy/paste.
Here's my swat at the puzzle:
https://whitemagicsoftware.com/keenquotes/
When exporting Markdown documents to HTML or PDF, my text editor uses KeenQuotes to curl straight quotes to their most likely candidate:
It seems that Sweden and Finland use the same character for opening and closing quotes, like ”this”, which is similar to using straight quotes.
Expected output: „Goedemorgen,” zei hij.
Returned output: “Goedemorgen,” zei hij.
And that's just language to take care of! Smart quotes for computers are hell and there should be a library to do all this so everyone doesn't need to reinvent the wheel.