Quote/apostrophe macros insert garbage text

FriendOfFred

Hello all,

I wanted a quick way to type curly quotation marks and apostrophes in Notepad++, so I created macros with Alt and Ctrl keyboard shortcuts that inserted these characters. To create the macros, I used Windows Alt+number pad shortcuts:

‘ Alt+0145 Ctrl+'
’ Alt+0146 Alt+'
“ Alt+0147 Ctrl+Shift+'
” Alt+0148 Alt+Shift+'

Sometimes, in conditions I still haven’t figured out how to reproduce, the macro inserts a string of characters after the desired character: [U+001]mVYȸ_[U+009][U+001]@HD[U+001]$N. U+001 is “Start of Heading” and U+009 is Tab. Only the second-to-last character in the string varies: it comes out as ", !, #, or $ depending on the character I tried to enter. When I enter the characters directly with Alt+numpad instead of using my Notepad++ shortcuts, the problem never occurs.

All files involved were encoded in UTF-8 without BOM, which is also my default Notepad++ encoding.

I also looked up the macro definition in my shortcuts.xml file, and didn’t find a clue there:

<Macro name="Insert apostrophe" Ctrl="no" Alt="yes" Shift="no" Key="222">
        <Action type="1" message="2170" wParam="0" lParam="0" sParam="&#x2019;" />
    </Macro>

Clearly I’m doing something wrong, but what?

guy038

Hi @FriendOfFred, and All,

I, personally, add your macro, which works correctly, on my configuration ! But I admit that I didn’t do intensive tests to determine when something is going wrong !

I’ve replied to a similar question, in the post, below :

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/community/topic/15909/replace-text-between-2-characters/2

So, here is a regex S/R, which will normalize the normal quotes to their enhanced version !

SEARCH (?-s)["“](.+?)["”]|['‘](.+?)['’]

REPLACE (?1“\1”:‘\2’)

Select the Regular expression search mode
Tick the Wrap around option
Click on the Replace All button

Et voilà !

So, given this initial text, below :

"Test"    "Test”    “Test"    “Test”

'Test'    'Test’    ‘Test'    ‘Test’

You should get the following text :

“Test”    “Test”    “Test”    “Test”

‘Test’    ‘Test’    ‘Test’    ‘Test’

So, at any time, when you perform this S/R, you’re sure that, after replacement, you get the two syntaxes “Test” and ‘Test’, only !

You could, even, record this S/R as a macro, if you prefer to !

Cheers,

guy038