[C4stor]

Because the next step when you face this problem is doing a search-replace of the quotes to remove them. ASCII quotes are on your keyboard, so you can actually type the command to remove them.

Unicode quotes probably aren't, so it's extra annoying to remove them, and they're not even the same character for start and end so you have to do it twice.

The time spent for removal is then vastly higher than with ASCII quotes, which in the context of unwanted characters may well qualify as "horrid" imo.

[stefco_]

Yes, this is pretty much what I meant. The "horrid" part is that I would like to do a quick

    /"<CR>xnx

(or similar) in vim to delete the quotes on a multi-line block. Even that is annoying. But with the unicode quotes I have to do a bit more conscious searching, which is a distraction.

Of course, the fact that the text is modified in any way is user-hostile. I don't mind re-typing a code example (since I'm trying to learn it), but I like to copy-paste sometimes (e.g. data literals).

I paid for a DRM-free ebook that's meant to be copy-pasted. We have a universal paradigm for how plaintext copy works. Apple charges a premium for good design. Ebook readers are generally supposed to get out of your way and let you focus on content. There is no reason for Apple Books to have this behavior.

[ygra]

PowerShell acknowledged smart quotes and dashes in its language design and allows proper quotes interchangeably with ASCII straight quotes. I always found that an interesting design choice, although I'm not sure how useful it actually is to allow people to copy/paste code from dubious web pages. On the other hand, they'll do that anyway, so why bother making it harder?

[hibbelig]

This is going down a rabbit hole. “This” is an English quote, whereas „this“ is a German quote; note that the open quote character in the English quote is equal to the close quote character in the German quote.

Then there is a less-often used style of quoting, similar to the French style, but: «this» is the French quote, whereas »this« is the German version. Yes, the open and close quotes are swapped.

I applaud the idea, but just want to point out that there are dragons lurking in the shadows.

[ygra]

All of “”" parse the same as ", so bracketing doesn't really enter into it. This is just to prevent smart quotes from destroying code, not to have more levels of nesting.

[pgcj_poster]

Additionally note that «this» is mostly used in French online and in Switzerland, while « this » is more common in professionally typeset works in France. Those are U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACEs between the guillemets.

[seszett]

Don't forget that the French quotes should have (non-breaking) spaces inside « like this » - only when used with the French language though, other languages usually don't use such spaces.

[tom_]

I've never liked this sort of thing in code, because as things stand they're a bit of a faff to type, and some tools don't support them very well. But it's a shame, because there's loads of types of quote mark and bracket in Unicode, not just the ``...''-type pair commonly used in English. So you could use one type for string delimiters and then use the other types, unescaped, in the string itself.

(The Unicode quotes also mostly come in matching pairs, so, for good or for ill, they'd in principle be nestable.)

[greggman3]

isn't that an input problem not an output problem? Is it giving you the quotes directly from the ebook or is it converting them on copy-paste? I'd assume there was a bug on the input side, that some tool wrongly converted `printf("Hello World")` to `printf(“Hello World”)` so what's in the ebook is wrong already. If so the issue is further up the chain.

[roryokane]

In this context, the selection within the ebook contains no quotes, whether ASCII or Unicode. The problem is that Apple’s Books app adds quotes and attribution text around the selected text. Books knows that the text it is putting in the clipboard isn’t what you selected, and it doesn’t care.

[DagAgren]

It's not changing quotes in the code. It is adding quotes. You have to delete them, not search-and-replace them, and it doesn't matter what kind of quotes they are, you have to do the exact same thing.

[emn13]

Search and replace is a pretty reasonable way to delete a quote; lot's of editor UI's make that much more convenient than finding the end of some blob of text you just pasted into some pre-existing context.

[u801e]

Depending on the regex engine, it may not be that much higher.

sed -i '/<open quote>|<close quote>/d'