Does anyone have particular feelings/experience with this topic and the technicalities that go with it?
I have some people that aren't even aware of the difference, some that don't care and some that insist on smart quotes from a typographical perspective.
When it's insisted upon it can create numerous problems. Most rich text editors require the use of "insert special character" when not pasting text, when pasting text it can work but but even Redactor doesn't convert them into proper html code which I'd prefer. Entering into text boxes like pagetitle requires the teaching of keyboard shortcuts.
Is there a more streamlined solution that could be implemented with maybe MODX events to parse and convert specific characters?
[ed. note: absent42 last edited this post 13 years ago.]
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You could use a plugin and replace normal quotes with smart quotes. This would probably be best done when the requested resource is being parsed, probably somewhere towards the end of parsing, like the OnWebPageComplete event. This function seems to work as-is, and can most likely be adapted to your needs.
function smart_quotes($text) {
$pattern = '/"((.)*?)"/i';
$text = preg_replace($pattern,"“\\1”",stripslashes($text));
$text = str_replace("\"","-",$text);
$text = addslashes($text);
return $text;
}
For HTML output, you might want something like this:
function smart_quotes($text) {
$pattern = '/"((.)*?)"/i';
$text = preg_replace($pattern,'$ldquo;' . "\\1" . '”',stripslashes($text));
$text = str_replace("\"","-",$text);
$text = addslashes($text);
return $text;
}
The problem is that you might have a description of someone who is 5'10" tall or something similar somewhere in your output. It won't matter unless it's inside a set of double quotes, but if it happens, all the quotes from there on will be backwards.
Thanks for both your replies Susan and Bob. I'm going to play around with the code you both suggested for my specific situation.
Like you implied Bob, there's a problem with recognition of the correct usage. MS Word somehow manages to figure out when a quote should curl, in what direction and when not, and in my experience does a pretty good job at guessing. I've searched but a generic catch all php equivalent but seems elusive.
It's really pretty rare for a lone double quote to end up inside two other double quotes. I'd just hope it doesn't happen and replace the solo one with " (followed by a semicolon) if it does. The regex will ignore that.
