November 2005
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
11h 9m
English
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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.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.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.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.
Hack #23. Straighten Smart Quotes
Convert curly quotes, apostrophes, and other fancy typographical symbols back to their ASCII equivalents.
Have you ever gone to copy a block of text from a web site and paste it into a text editor (or try to paste it into a weblog post of your own)? The text comes through, but all the apostrophes and quote marks end up as random-looking symbols. The web site uses fancy publishing software to produce smart quotes and apostrophes, but your text editor doesn't understand them. This hack dumbs down these fancy typographical symbols to their ASCII equivalents.
The Code
This user script runs on all pages. It constructs an array of fancy characters (by their Unicode representation). Then, it gets a list of all the text nodes on the page and executes a search-and-replace on each node to convert each fancy character to a plain-text equivalent.
Tip
Learn more about Unicode at http://www.unicode.org.
In JavaScript, the replace method takes a regular expression object as its first parameter. For performance reasons, we build all our regular expressions first, and then reuse them every time through the loop. If we had used the inline regular expression syntax, Firefox would need to rebuild each regular expression object every time through the loop—a significant performance drain on large pages!
Save the following user script as dumbquotes.user.js:
// ==UserScript== // @name DumbQuotes // @namespace http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/ // @description straighten ...
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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.