May 2007
Beginner
628 pages
15h 46m
English
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Removing Smart Quotes
Problem
You want simple ASCII text out of a document in MS Word, but when you save it as text some odd characters still remain.
Solution
Translate the odd characters back to simple ASCII like this:
$ tr '\221\222\223\224\226\227' '\047\047""--' <odd.txt >plain.txt
Discussion
Such “smart quotes” come from the Windows-1252 character set, and may also show up in email messages that you save as text. To quote from Wikipedia on this subject:
A few mail clients send curved quotes using the Windows-1252 codes but mark the text as ISO-8859-1 causing problems for decoders that do not make the dubious assumption that C1 control codes in ISO-8859-1 text were meant to be Windows-1252 printable characters.
To clean up such text, we can use the tr
command. The 221 and 222 (octal) curved single-quotes will be
translated to simple single quotes. We specify them in octal (047) to make it easier on us, since the shell
uses single quotes as a delimiter. The 223
and 224 (octal) are opening
and closing curved quotes, and will be translated to simple double
quotes. The double quotes can be typed within the second argument since
the single quotes protect them from shell interpretation. The 226 and 227
(octal) are dash characters and will be translated to hyphens (and no,
that second hyphen in the second argument is not technically needed,
since tr will repeat the last character to match
the length of the first argument, but it’s better to be
specific).
See Also
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.