On 15/06/09 6:43 PM, "Nicholas Cole" nicholas.cole@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 8:01 PM, Alex Rosstm-alex@rosiba.com wrote:
How about:
`(.*?)'(?!s)
So it starts by matching `, and matches until it finds a single ' that is not followed by ³s².
Now you can replace this with
\enquote{$1}
Dear Alex,
I will admit that is very, very cunning. Unfortunately, there is one other convention that messes it up, which is that some (especially classical) possessives are in the form Socrates'. Still, they are rare and that does make that regex useful!
I'm not sure how to capture this in regex, since I have not yet mastered that particular kung-fu, but shouldn't most quoted text terminate with punctuation, where as posessives and contractions would usually not have an additional piece of punctuation immediately beside them? For example:
This is `some of Jefferson's text.'
Or
The vagabond stared and said 'the rails are the way to travel,' and then moved
along.
So for a quotation the terminating quote mark will either be preceded or followed by punctuation (depending on whether you put your periods inside of the quote marks or outside). A possessive such as Socrates' or a contraction like 'I've' would normally be followed by a space or another character.
Something like this seems to work:
Find: `(.*?)(.|,)'(?!s)
Replace:
\enquote{$1$2}$3
jeff