Forum OpenACS Development: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"?

Posted by Dave Bauer on 02/08/15 09:22 PM

What are the most recent best practices for handling Microsoft Word Smart Quotes pasted into a textarea?

2: Re: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"? (response to 1)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 02/09/15 10:19 AM

Hi Dave

we ran into some problems with HTMLarea when replacing the smart quotes with the HTML entity 8217, so just ended up doing this:

set microsoft_apostrophe \u2019
regsub -all $microsoft_apostrophe $letter "'" letter

hope this helps
Brian

3: Re: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"? (response to 1)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 02/10/15 08:33 AM

you mean, pasted into plain textarea, or pasted into a richtext widget? For the latter one, we switched a while ago to ckedit, which works nice and supports mobile devices. it has a paste from word, and also vice versa, an extra plugin for creating smart quotes while you are typing in the text area.

In general, tidy is still very helpful to clean up wierd input. e.g. "tidy ... -b ..." strips smart quotes and em-dashes.

4: Re: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"? (response to 3)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 02/10/15 06:33 PM

Thanks,

I do recall now I have used Tidy before. Can I just call it from a shell script? Is that the easiest way. It shouldn't be called that much as there are not that many editors in this application.

5: Re: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"? (response to 4)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 02/11/15 01:27 AM

Dave, have a look at xowiki-utility-procs.tcl [1]. it contains a function callable like in:

 set cleanText [::xowiki::tidy clean $text]

it should be straightforward to modify this for your needs.

-g
[1] xowiki::tidy

6: Re: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"? (response to 1)

Posted by Neophytos Demetriou on 02/11/15 01:37 AM

I have uploaded a version of a (modified) critcl-based htmltidy library. It's been a while. Just making it available for anyone who cares. If you need further info please do not hesitate to contact me. Here's the link:
https://openacs.org/storage/download/htmltidy.tar.bz2?file_id=4230928

7: Re: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"? (response to 6)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 02/11/15 10:29 AM

Hey Neophytos! Long time no see. Good to have you around again.

Brian

8: Re: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"? (response to 7)

Posted by Neophytos Demetriou on 02/16/15 10:36 AM

Hi Brian, I've been keeping myself busy with all sorts of stuff. Glad to be around again and I hope we'll get a chance to meet again in the near future.

9: Re: Best practices for "Smart Quotes"? (response to 8)

Posted by Brian Fenton on 02/16/15 12:41 PM

I'll look forward to it.