• View
• Edit
• History
• Attach
• Print
• Backlinks

CurlyQuotes

Questions answered by this recipe

How can I turn straight quotes into curly quotes when a page is displayed, without interfering with other markup that involves quotes? How can I create m- and n-dashes with simple wiki markup?

Description

Add the following to your config.php:

if ($action != 'edit') {
 # make curly quotes 
 Markup("\"",'_end',"/\"(.*?)\"/",'“$1”');
 # make m-dash 
 Markup("---",'_end',"/---([^-])/",'—$1');
 # make n-dash 
 Markup("--",'_end',"/--([^->])/",'–$1'); 
 # curly single quote in contraction
 Markup("a'a",'_end',"/([A-Za-z])'([A-Za-z][A-Za-z]?[^A-Za-z])/",'$1’$2');
}

Notes

Release Notes

If the recipe has multiple releases, then release notes can be placed here. Note that it's often easier for people to work with "release dates" instead of "version numbers".

Comments

For me, the m-dash rule above didn't work because PmWiki tried to do the n-dash rule first (so I got -– instead of — for ---). I also didn't see the need to put all the markup at the "_end" (though it is necessary for the curly quotes, else things like alt text for images don't work). Here's my solution (with an additional markup for ellipsis to turn ... into … — this isn't needed if you use MarkupExtensions):

if ($action != 'edit') {
# curly double quotes
  Markup( "dquo", '_end', "/\"(.*?)\"/", '“$1”' );
# curly single quote in contraction 
  Markup( "squo", '_end', "/([A-Za-z])'([A-Za-z][A-Za-z]?[^A-Za-z])/", '$1’$2');
# m-dash 
  Markup( "mdash", '<ndash', "/---([^-])/", '&mdash;$1' );
# n-dash (beware [-- and --])
  Markup( "ndash", 'inline', "/[^\\[]--([^-\\]])/", '&ndash;$1' );
# ellipsis
  Markup( "...", 'inline', "/\.\.\./", '&hellip;' );
}

Tony Colley July 18, 2006, at 01:03 PM

TonyColley July 23, 2006, at 11:09 AM

Actually, this still didn't quite work because using " as a symbol for seconds or inches caused problems. Also, if you do a multiparagraph quote, it didn't handle the opening quote at the beginning of any but the last paragraph.

So, I gave up on automatically determining where curly double quotes were appropriate and created a shorthand for entering left and right curly double quotes:

# curly double quotes
Markup( "ldquo", 'inline', "/\"-/", '“' );
Markup( "rdquo", 'inline', "/-\"/", '”' );

And I created a couple of directives to wrap text in curly quotes:

# [:dq text:] wraps text in curly double quotes
Markup( 'dquo', 'directives', '/\\[:dq (.*?):\\]/',
        "“$1”" );
# [:sq text:] wraps text in curly single quotes
Markup( 'squo', 'directives', '/\\[:sq (.*?):\\]/',
        "‘$1’" );

Finally, I did keep the markup for automatically converting ' to ’ in contractions and possessives (except possessives of words ending in "s", e.g. "James' dog"):

# curly single quote in contraction 
Markup( "apostrophe", '_end', "/([A-Za-z])'([A-Za-z][A-Za-z]?[^A-Za-z])/",
        '$1’$2');

TonyColley July 19, 2006, at 02:04 PM

If you're pasting text into the wiki from another program, including html2wiki, you may find that perfectly valid curly quotes get turned into high-ASCII characters by your operating system. I guess the ideal way to handle this would be to intercept them when the form is submitted and save them as standard straight quotes, but as a stopgap I've extended this curly-quote recipe to turn the Windows high-ASCII characters into valid curly quotes when the page is rendered:

if ($action != 'edit') {
 # make curly quotes 
 Markup("\"",'_end',"/\"(.*?)\"/",'“$1”');
 Markup(chr(147),'_end',"/".chr(147)."/",'“');
 Markup(chr(148),'_end',"/".chr(148)."/",'”'); 
 # make m-dash 
 Markup("---",'_end',"/---([^-])/",'—$1');
 Markup(chr(151),'_end',"/".chr(151)."/",'—'); 
 # make n-dash 
 Markup("--",'_end',"/--([^-])/",'–$1'); 
 Markup(chr(150),'_end',"/".chr(150)."/",'–$1');
 # curly single quote in contraction
 Markup("a'a",'_end',"/([A-Za-z])'([A-Za-z][A-Za-z]?[^A-Za-z])/",'$1’$2');
 Markup(chr(146),'_end',"/".chr(146)."/",'’');
}

If you're using an OS other than Windows to do your editing, you may need to change the chr() numbers to match the characters your OS is serving up. I got these character numbers from the HTML Validator when I tried to validate my wiki pages!

Ben Stallings July 18, 2006, at 11:17 AM

This markup is not good with pmwikidraw!! The links/URLs are destroyed!!!
Markup("\"",'_end',"/\"(.*?)\"/",'“$1”');

See Also

Contributors

John Cooley, Ben Stallings