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Comment by trzeci | Hacker News Reader

You're right. I used to programming quotes so much that every variation from it makes a pain. Especially mentioned below the automatic quote replacement by some text editor. Which does not make sense for me, when I paste a code snippet.

Another pain is when I see such code snippets on the web.

For the clarity, it's not only the US quotes I have a problem with. Other languages have also their corks:

- PL: „quote”

- PL: ‚quote’ (single variant)

- PL: ‘quote’ (british variant)

- FR: «quote»

- DE: »quote«

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DE would be: „Zitat“. »Zitat« is also allowed. «Zitat» is mostly used in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Note missing spaces compared to French.

(Edited after correction from user bloak below)

> »« is allowed but mostly used in Switzerland

I think it's «...» in Switzerland, while »...« is widely used in several countries, including Germany, and is the "main" system arguably only in Denmark.

See https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-l...

You are of course right and I edited my comment accordingly.

DE would be: „Zitat“

I thought you made another mistake here, but it turns out it's just my font that is broken. For anyone else who might have this problem: The closing marks are supposed to go from bottom left to top right, whereas they are displayed going from top left to bottom right :(

Yeah, Hacker News defaults to the Geneva font. Those quotation marks are not pretty :(

French quotes, unlike most others, must also be surrounded by spaces (like the other punctuation signs that are made of two parts) like this:

FR : « quote »

And all of the spaces except for the one after the ":" should be non-breaking spaces.

One thing that irritates me is seeing "foreign" quoting styles in English, do editors or keyboard settings do this automatically ?

If I'm writing French then I will use «quote», I don't mix things between languages.

I could say the same about punctuation spacing. For some reason, I see this mistake a lot in some places like Quora (which is popular in India): "Putting the space before punctuation ,like this .It drives me nuts .How could anyone ever think that is correct ?"

Also, French conventions like putting the dollar sign after the amount (123$), or spaces in between all punctuation, like you used in your first sentence.

> Also, French conventions like ... or spaces in between all punctuation, like you used in your first sentence.

I'm a native English speaker, French is my second language.

Polish also has m-dash quotes for dialogue and nesting quotes that alternate Polish/inverted-French.

https://culture.pl/en/article/pen-to-paper-mastering-the-qui...

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