Re: GNUlib unicode encoding causes smart quotes to be displayed in program's output

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/6/19 6:52 PM, Wes Hurd wrote:
> What I meant about smart quotes being dangerous was, if copying the 
> output text that contains smart quotes to use somewhere else (especially 
> in code), the smart quotes have to be manually replaced which is tedious 
> for the user (programmer).
> The user may not even see that smart quotes are being used unless there 
> is a breaking error.

That sort of problem can occur with any quoting style. For example:

$ cp '\0' 'xxx'
cp: cannot stat '\0': No such file or directory

If I cut the '\0' (including the apostrophes) and then paste it into a C 
program, like this:

char *filename = '\0';

the program will compile (it's valid C code!), but it won't do what I 
want. If I paste '\0' into a Python program, I'll get a different string 
(it's a valid Python string too) but it won't equal the filename I gave 
to 'cp'.

Arguably curved quotes would be *safer* than apostrophes here, because 
they would require the programmer to think about quoting when the 
programmer is doing something silly like copying quoted strings blindly 
into a program.

Admittedly this example is contrived, but there's lots of non-contrived 
examples like it.