Re: [PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII

Theodore Ts'o
2021-05-10T19:22:48Z

On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 02:49:44PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Mon, 2021-05-10 at 13:55 +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > This patch series is doing conversion only when using ASCII makes
> > more sense than using UTF-8.
> >
> > See, a number of converted documents ended with weird characters
> > like ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE (U+FEFF) character. This specific
> > character doesn't do any good.
> >
> > Others use NO-BREAK SPACE (U+A0) instead of 0x20. Harmless, until
> > someone tries to use grep[1].
>
> Replacing those makes sense. But replacing emdashes — which are a
> distinct character that has no direct replacement in ASCII and which
> people do *deliberately* use instead of hyphen-minus — does not.

I regularly use --- for em-dashes and -- for en-dashes. Markdown will
automatically translate 3 ASCII hypens to em-dashes, and 2 ASCII
hyphens to en-dashes. It's much, much easier for me to type 2 or 3
hypens into my text editor of choice than trying to enter the UTF-8
characters. If we can make sphinx do this translation, maybe that's
the best way of dealing with these two characters?

Cheers,

- Ted