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Comment by cmg | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, does the HN system replace three dots (...) with a space in titles? The title of the article contains (`...`), but the title here just has a space.

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OP's OS may have replaced three periods (`...`) with an ellipsis character (`…`), which HN probably filters out in titles.

Oh that's interesting. I assumed people copy/pasted titles when they submit!

macOS has ellipsis autocorrection, for example. I've had it turned off forever but perhaps it applies to <input type="text"> boxes like in the submission form.

I wondered that too for a while as well. I then had two people on my team, one on windows and one on macos, and we discovered that macos (or something on the computer) was converting those automatically.

macos (or some application(s) on macos) also seems to use a unicode version of double quotes " instead of the standard ascii one. I spent a ridiculous amount of time debugging a line in a shell script that had the unicode quotes instead of "normal" ones and broke in ways that were horrible to figure out. Eventually I discovered that he had composed the line in Slack and pasted it in. Definitely something to watch out for!

I've had the same problem with contributors corrupting JSON.

For reference:

TextEdit - Preferences - Disable 'Smart Quotes' and 'Smart Dashes'

You can do it at the OS level with Preferences -> Keyboard -> Text tab -> Uncheck "Use smart quotes and dashes".

Thank you! Will let them know if this happens again

The quote problem has been a long standing issue since before Unicode became the dominant encoding. You will often see older web pages with mojibake caused by MacRoman encoding of smart quotes.

We also used to have fun with MacOS' perldoc command rendering things cleverly and breaking copy-paste out of the documentation - this resulted in the "hilarious" code here: https://metacpan.org/release/HAARG/local-lib-2.000029/source...

The article title doesn't have backtick-quotes either, so it certainly looks like they did something manually.

The actual <title> does have backticks. They're in there to make the periods in the on-the-page title display in a <code> tag, it looks like.

I'd put my money on an automatic HN thing, it massages titles a fair amount.

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