[PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII

[Edward Cree]

On 10/05/2021 12:55, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> The main point on this series is to replace just the occurrences
> where ASCII represents the symbol equally well

> 	- U+2014 ('—'): EM DASH
Em dash is not the same thing as hyphen-minus, and the latter does not
 serve 'equally well'.  People use em dashes because — even in
 monospace fonts — they make text easier to read and comprehend, when
 used correctly.
I accept that some of the other distinctions — like en dashes — are
 needlessly pedantic (though I don't doubt there is someone out there
 who will gladly defend them with the same fervour with which I argue
 for the em dash) and I wouldn't take the trouble to use them myself;
 but I think there is a reasonable assumption that when someone goes
 to the effort of using a Unicode punctuation mark that is semantic
 (rather than merely typographical), they probably had a reason for
 doing so.

> 	- U+2018 ('‘'): LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
> 	- U+2019 ('’'): RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
> 	- U+201c ('“'): LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
> 	- U+201d ('”'): RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
(These are purely typographic, I have no problem with dumping them.)

> 	- U+00d7 ('×'): MULTIPLICATION SIGN
Presumably this is appearing in mathematical formulae, in which case
 changing it to 'x' loses semantic information.

> Using the above symbols will just trick tools like grep for no good
> reason.
NBSP, sure.  That one's probably an artefact of some document format
 conversion somewhere along the line, anyway.
But what kinds of things with × or — in are going to be grept for?

If there are em dashes lying around that semantically _should_ be
 hyphen-minus (one of your patches I've seen, for instance, fixes an
 *en* dash moonlighting as the option character in an `ethtool`
 command line), then sure, convert them.
But any time someone is using a Unicode character to *express
 semantics*, even if you happen to think the semantic distinction
 involved is a pedantic or unimportant one, I think you need an
 explicit grep case to justify ASCIIfying it.

-ed