[Python-ideas] Smart/Curly Quote Marks and cPython

[Ryan Birmingham]

The quotes I intended in this email are just “ ‘ ” , and
’ where the encoding is appropriate.
Internationalization was not the intent of this. I do believe that you have
a good point with supporting common quotes in other languages, but I
believe that such a change would be large enough to consider a PEP.
I am aware that there are other unicode characters, even in English with
the Quotation_Mark character property, but this proposed change aims to
solve the problem caused when editors, mail clients, web browsers, and
operating systems over-zealously replacing straight quotes with these
typographical characters.

-Ryan Birmingham

On 22 October 2016 at 02:35, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 01:17:58AM -0400, Ryan Birmingham wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I want to start small and ask about smart/curly quote marks (” vs ").
>
> Which curly quotes are you going to support? There's Dutch, of course:
>
> „…” ‚…’
>
> But how about … ?
>
> - English ‘…’ “…”
>
> - French « … » “…”
>
> - Swiss «…» ‹…›
>
> - Hebrew „…” ‚…’
>
> - Hungarian „…” »…«
>
> - Icelandic „…“ ‚…‘
>
> - Japanese 「…」 『…』
>
> - Polish „…” «…» »…«
>
> - Swedish ”…” ’…’ »…» »…«
>
> to mention only a few. I think it would be unfair to all the non-Dutch
> programmers if we only supported Dutch quotation marks, but as you can
> see, supporting the full range of internationalised curly quotes is
> difficult.
>
>
> > Although most languages do not support these characters as quotation
> marks,
> > I believe that cPython should, if possible.
>
> You say "most" -- do you know which programming languages support
> typographical quotation marks for strings? It would be good to see a
> survey of which languages support this feature, and how they cope with
> the internationalisation problem.
>
> I think this is likely to be just too hard. There's a reason why
> programming has standardized on the lowest common denominator for
> quotation marks '' "" and occasionally `` as well.
>
>
> --
> Steve
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