Aren't dumb quotes kinda, well . . . dumb?

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
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I’m a little surprised that, as far as I can tell, I’m the only person on this forum who is interested in smart quotes – the kind of directional, curved quotation marks that appear automatically in posts made in this forum but that are very difficult to use in AppSheet apps. They look like “this.” I’d like to try to make the case for an improvement in the platform and see if I get a response. If not, I’ll give up for now.

First, because I have a long-term interest in using AppSheet in language education and therefore want language to look right in the app, I’ve gone to the trouble to figure out how display proper “smart” quotes in AppSheet:

[Directional quotes anywhere you want them](https://community.appsheet.com/t/directional-quotes-anywhere-you-want-them/11227) Tips & Tricks ?

In formulas (expressions), AppSheet doesn’t distinguish between directional quotes (left and right different) and straight quotes. So, until now, I haven’t been able to use directional quotation marks in column names and in concatenate() expressions. Today, however, I hit upon a work around. First, I noticed that AppSheet had no trouble with the directional quotation marks that I put in cells of my Google spreadsheet: [28] So, I decided to add a column with the left and right quotations mar…

Unfortunately, however, my method is something of a pain in the rear end to implement and it has the additional disadvantage of forcing the creator to construct virtual columns when directional quotes are required. Today, I came up with a slight improvement in this approach but the basic problems remain.

Fixing this problem could be implemented by adding CHAR() to the AppSheet expression arsenal. I’m not sure how hard that would be for the engineers at AppSheet but it would make things quite straight-forward but creators who need to use special characters. CHAR() is, of course, how Google spreadsheets lets us use such characters (often inside of CONCATENATE()).

I’ve posted in the past about emoji and other special characters and those posts got moderately enthusiastic responses. That’s partly why I’m scratching my head about the lack of discussion about directional quotation marks and the need for a CHAR() expression. I’ll be interested to read any responses this post gets.

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I m not fully and carefullly reading your whole post and thread.
But to get the double quotation string to appear, why dont you wrap that text by single quote?

`

’ “Hello” ’

`

should return “Hello” in appsheet.

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Really!? I’ll give it a try. I didn’t think it was this easy. I’ll be back.

4

yeah, easy peasy.
Try it out.

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5

By the way, 「本当です。」

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6

I hate smart quotes in all contexts.

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Haha, on this planet, there are always different opinions and preference, which we need to value.

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Even though I don’t share your antipathy toward smart quotes, I think your comment is informative. My hypothesis is that this is a cultural thing. If this were a forum for literary types, I suspect there would be many more people who share my interest in the curly cues. Conversely, I suspect that people who have a lot of experience coding would probably prefer that the squiggles but done away with entirely. But, if we have CHAR() we can decorate are little apps as we see fit, without causing trouble for others.

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9

tsuji_koichi:

By the way, 「本当です。」

I appreciate your help but my test indicates “not really”:

3X_7_8_78c1c0e4f6986b26be4c6435f6975ce0dea817f4.png

. . . produces . . .

3X_5_a_5a9e55f5c15bbdd445e6a52113c9590d4d57e6ec.png

But these are straight/dumb, not smart. My method produces this:

3X_f_7_f73d1b51da5ff7e89facbe589596de45f8ab41a8.png

It’s a subtle difference in this font but the different is more pronounced in other fonts.

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I left my reading glass behind, so it looks the same to me.
Not sure what you really want to achieve.

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Probably I don’t understand what smart quite does mean in this context. Sorry for my poor help.

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No problem. By the way, your approach is a lot easier that other approaches that were discussed here:

[Quotation marks in a text string](https://community.appsheet.com/t/quotation-marks-in-a-text-string/282) Questions

In other languages, you can include quotation marks in a text string by surrounding the string with the opposite marking, i.e. single quotes around double quotes, or double quotes around single quotes. Appsheet does not seem to like this. I’m trying to use 6", as in “six inch”, in an expression. I’ve tried ‘6"’, text(6"), text(‘6"’), to no avail. Is Appsheet capable of handling this, and if so, how? Specifically I’m trying to see if 6" is in a list of text items: IN( text(6") , [column])

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13

Good, doctor.

I invite you to join our club through https://www.appsheetdojo.com/ to learn more about AppSheet !

@Takuya_Miyai

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Joined!! (Just the free course I’m kinda cheap – I’m still using AppSheet on the free plan. )

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15

Good man!

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