Using sed to straighten quotes.

[Tim Chase]

While it *can* be done in sed, the solution requires visiting every
character and manually noting a transliteration, as well as doing
those changes for every input encoding that you can 

You should have the `iconv` package on your system which will let you
specify the input/output encodings as well as force those characters
to be transliterated:

 iconv -f utf8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT input.txt > output.txt

which converts from (-f) UTF-8 encoding to transliterated ASCII.  If
your input is some other Windows code-page or other source, you can
change the "from" encoding to something other than "utf8" such as
"cp1252".

-tim


On April 17, 2017, Jeffery Mewtamer wrote:
> Things like left and right double curly quotes and single right
> curly quotes are the most common offenders, which also screws up my
> screen reader's pronunciation of contractions and possessive,
> though things like ellipsis, em-dashes, and accented letters also
> cause problems.
> 
> Most of these problems can be fixed manually, though it means I
> often spend as much time correcting the file as I do reading it.
> 
> I know how to use sed to do global search and replace on plain text
> files, at least where both the string to be found and the string
> it's to be replaced with can be typed, but most of the replacements
> I'd like to make have search strings containing characters not on my
> keyboard.
> 
> So, how do I tell sed to replace a left double curly quote with a
> straight double quote, an ellipsis with three periods, or an e with
> an acute accent with a normal e among other such things? And if
> this is beyond sed's capabilities, could someone suggest another
> command line tool that can automate this task?
> 
> -- 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Jeffery Wright
> Bachelor of Computer Science
> President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
> Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the
> Albemarle.
> 
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