#191 a" and a' grab extraneous whitespace

[Alex Korn]

When using v, c, or d (highlight, change, or delete), then a (around) quotation marks (", ', or backtick), extraneous whitespace around the quoted text will get highlighted or deleted, unlike what happens with [], {}, etc.

Examples are below on what gets highlighted/changed/deleted (using generic "highlighted" below) when running a command while the cursor is on "test".

// BAD
$var = 'test'; // 'test' is highlighted *as well as the space before it*
$var = "test"; // (same as above)
$var = `test`; // (same as above)
$var = "test" ; // "test" is highlighted *as well as the space after it*, but not the space before it
// GOOD
$var = [test]; // [test] is highlighted, and not the space before it
$var = (test); // (same as above)
$var = {test}; // (same as above)
$var = <test>;
$var = [test] ; // [test] is highlighted, and not the space before or after it

I would expect quotation marks to follow the same "a" rules as brackets.

[Ernie Rael]

Yeah, I would expect that too. But it doesn't. Here's the help taken from vim8.0. In particular, note the sentence "Any trailing white space is included, unless there is none, then leading white space is included."

a"                          *v_aquote* *aquote*
a'                          *v_a'* *a'*
a`                          *v_a`* *a`*
            "a quoted string".  Selects the text from the previous
            quote until the next quote.  The 'quoteescape' option
            is used to skip escaped quotes.
            Only works within one line.
            When the cursor starts on a quote, Vim will figure out
            which quote pairs form a string by searching from the
            start of the line.
            Any trailing white space is included, unless there is
            none, then leading white space is included.
            When used in Visual mode it is made characterwise.
            Repeating this object in Visual mode another string is
            included.  A count is currently not used.

[Alex Korn]

Gotcha - I guess that rule makes sense for non-coding situations. At least I understand the justification and won't be cursing you for some off-by-one error or something!

And in case anyone else stumbles across this, here's a link for the documentation:
http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/motion.html#v_aquote