Finding sentences open with “curly” quotation marks and not closed ...
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Re: Finding sentences open with quotation marks and not closed
Is there a way search for open curly quotes and missing the closed curly quotes?
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You really don’t describe your problem in-depth in order to get the best advice, but perhaps the solution for
(and)in THIS POSTING can be applied to solve your problem (with an adjustment, obviously, for the characters involved). -
@Ian-Oh ,
A little patience would have done you some good; the regulars here are not paid to be here, and there isn’t guaranteed 24/7 coverage for immediate responses; sometimes, it takes a few hours (or even a day or two) before someone who has the necessary knowledge set and the free time is able to come and answer your question.
I basically answered this question when I responded to your similar but UDL-focused question.
If your goal is really to “find imbalanced smart quotes”, and you don’t care whether you do it with UDL or regular expressions or what have you, you really could have just asked it as one question, and suggested both “UDL” and “search” as possible techniques.
I forgot to check for open without any closes, so my expressions before might not work. However, @guy038’s nested-technique from the thread that @Alan-Kilborn linked should likely do what you want. Just use
“”instead of()or{}from his example. -
Probably what happened with @Ian-Oh is that he switched gears. Maybe started out with the more-generic thought in this thread, then decided maybe UDL could help so he tried that and then thought of a question on that topic. I don’t particularly see it as impatient, although that very well could be.
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@Ian-Oh ,
I hope I didn’t cause offense. @Alan-Kilborn is right: your posts are reasonable.
Perhaps I would have done it differently (when I had the second idea for solving the same underlying problem, I may have just posted again in the same discussion rather than starting a second discussion) – but not everyone has to post my way, and it was wrong of me to expect that.
And a “search for unclosed curly quotes” really is a separate technical problem from “use curly quotes in UDL keywords, operators, or delimiters”, and really does make sense to ask them separately, even if they did start from trying to solve the same problem.
So sorry for my hasty words about patience.
Hopefully my two-of-the-same-in-a-row regex in your UDL question, or Guy’s nested-paren-style answer that Alan linked will help you find the solution you need. Good luck
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Sorry, … yes I found my way to an old thread and when I tried to reply it prompted me to start a new thread. I was hoping it would provide some context … but it didn’t, and I didn’t correct it. My apologies.
I am trying to find mismatched curly quotes. ALT+0147 and ALT+0148 on a PC keyboard. @guy038 RegEx search “(?:[^“”]++|(?0))*” did the trick. It’s pretty good and I’m happy with that. Thank you for pointing that to me.
UDL will make it more visible… but sometimes it’s too hard to see even when it’s staring me in the face. That’s why I need this Find function. I’ll continue my reply there.
While @guy038’s solution is good enough, the problem is I could have a missing open curly quote, and it will miss it. So that’s why the UDL would help.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
