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Comment by DeusExMachina | Hacker News Reader

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DeusExMachina

Are you sure about that space thing?

I live in Europe and I have been browsing the Internet for 20 years now, and this is the first time I hear about it.

Also, I visit plenty of Eropean news sites, and none does that.

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It seems to be pretty common among the French at least. I haven't seen it in print media, only from individuals.

In French, no space before a comma or a period (unless want to explicitly communicate your disdain for computery things or you’re above 60) but we do put a space before : ? !

Example: « Pas de palais : pas de palais ! »

(^Quote from the Asterix movie that will be way more useful to you for making French friends in a bar than saying « I can’t speak French » in French)

This is actually a really interesting example of the "space before punctuation" thing rather than " space before punctuation ".

Also: it looks like we're using colons differently, is that right?

We use colons for the same reason as in English, but there is a space before colons in French (Microsoft Word inserts it automatically for you in French), and no uppercase after the colon.

It's a somewhat common error, but I don't think it's ever used deliberately, especially in any professional setting.

French typographic rules prescribe a space before ‘!’, ‘;’, ‘:’, and ‘?’.

Interesting. I've never realized it. I learned french in school but couldn't remember learning about that.

Example: https://www.gouvernement.fr/argumentaire/parcoursup-la-plate...

To be super-pedantic, the correct character is a non-breakable half-space (unicode 0x202F). It actually makes sense: it shouldn't be breakable, or the text layout would be ugly (the colon starting on a new line?). And it should be reduced in size, because indeed you don't want a full space before a colon...

This article is using the international quotation marks though, proper typography would be to use « and », which also require non-breaking spaces before and after them.

The rule for punctuation is that the nbsp is before the double punctuations, those with two elements (?!;:).

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