Fancy quotes broken inside parentheses

[bglickstein]

If I put text in plain quotes inside of parentheses ("like this"), Wordpress mistranslates the quotes into curly quotes. I have a simple patch against wp-includes/formatting.php (tag 2.2.1, revision 5735) that should fix this. It makes open-parens (and open-brackets) "transparent" to left curly quotes, and close-parens (and close-brackets) "transparent" to right curly quotes.

Cheers,

• Bob

Index: formatting.php
===================================================================
--- formatting.php	(revision 5772)
+++ formatting.php	(working copy)
@@ -20,8 +20,8 @@
 	$static_characters = array_merge(array('---', ' -- ', '--', 'xn–', '...', '``', '\'s', '\'\'', ' (tm)'), $cockney); 
 	$static_replacements = array_merge(array('—', ' — ', '–', 'xn--', '…', '“', '’s', '”', ' ™'), $cockneyreplace);
 
-	$dynamic_characters = array('/\'(\d\d(?:’|\')?s)/', '/(\s|\A|")\'/', '/(\d+)"/', '/(\d+)\'/', '/(\S)\'([^\'\s])/', '/(\s|\A)"(?!\s)/', '/"(\s|\S|\Z)/', '/\'([\s.]|\Z)/', '/(\d+)x(\d+)/');
-	$dynamic_replacements = array('’$1','$1‘', '$1″', '$1′', '$1’$2', '$1“$2', '”$1', '’$1', '$1×$2');
+	$dynamic_characters = array('/\'(\d\d(?:’|\')?s)/', '/(\s|\A|")\'/', '/(\d+)"/', '/(\d+)\'/', '/(\S)\'([^\'\s])/', '/(\s|\A)([\[(]*)"(?!\s)/', '/"([\])]*)(\s|\S|\Z)/', '/\'([\s.]|\Z)/', '/(\d+)x(\d+)/');
+	$dynamic_replacements = array('’$1','$1‘', '$1″', '$1′', '$1’$2', '$1$2“$3', '”$1$2', '’$1', '$1×$2');
 
 	for ( $i = 0; $i < $stop; $i++ ) {
  		$curl = $textarr[$i];

[foolswisdom]

Hello Bob, Thank you for the bug report. What is the version of WordPress you discovered the problem in and the one that your fix is for? The actual behavior is that the quotes are translated into smart quotes, but the expected behavior is that they are not?

[Otto42]

Replying to bglickstein:

If I put text in plain quotes inside of parentheses ("like this"), Wordpress mistranslates the quotes into curly quotes.

Define "mistranslates"? I believe this is expected behavior, it's supposed to translate them into "curly quotes". Why would you expect it not to do so when they are in parenths?

[bglickstein]

I have seen this problem in all versions of Wordpress since I started using it (v2.0) but only just now got around to doing something about it.

To be clearer, the problem is that the opening quote gets translated into a right double-quote when it should be translated into a left double-quote.

Cheers,

• Bob

[mrmist]

There's just too many of these reports.

See also #7754 #4539 #3810 #4116 #1258