#383 Smart Quotes incorrect around dash/hyphen

[Peter Hull]

I wanted to apply smart quotes to the sequence '-' however this is rendered in HTML as ‘-‘ rather than ‘-’.

This was in Sphinx, but they advised me it was in the docutils code. (see https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/6884)

I can reproduce with

echo "QUOTE '-'" | rst2html.py --smart-quotes=yes|grep QUOTE
also
echo 'QUOTE "-"' | rst2html.py --smart-quotes=yes|grep QUOTE

Using rst2html.py (Docutils 0.15.2 [release], Python 3.7.5, on darwin)

[Peter Hull]

Sorry, the example was

echo "QUOTE '-'" | rst2html.py --smart-quotes=yes|grep QUOTE

[Günter Milde]

Thank you for reporting the problem.

The reason for this behaviour is, that in some cases, opening quotes should follow hypens (and other characters). Examples are ("this"), ["that"], {'this'} but also---"dumb" as well as literal---dashes.
These are not trivial to differentiate from use cases like "((" or "-".
You may try the attached patch or the advice in http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/smartquotes.html
"In such cases, it's best to use the recommended apostrophe character (’) in the source".

[Peter Hull]

OK, thanks for the clarification. I will use 'explicit' smart quotes for this.

[Günter Milde]

Fixed in 0.17b.dev (repository version).

[Günter Milde]

Fixed in Docutils 0.17.
Thank you for reporting.