Too Many Quotes

[kleinfelter]

I wrote a workflow to translate clipboard smart-quotes into ordinary ones.  It works just fine when run from a shell prompt:

• pbpaste | textutil -stdin -stdout -convert txt | tr “” \" |tr ’ \' | pbcopy

 

But when I put this into a workflow, my quote marks get doubled and tripled.

 

For example, if I put this in my clipboard:

• “You’re smart!”

and i run the command line listed at the top of this posting, I get:

• "You're smart!"

but if I run the exact same command in an Alfred "run script" workflow, I get:

• """You""'re smart!"""

How do I make Alfred stop messing with the output of my shell script?

[Andrew]

Could you share the workflow you have created, it may be a simple case of the script escaping in Alfred.

 

[moved to workflow help]

[kleinfelter]

Thanks.  I can't see how to attach a file to this forum, so I uploaded it to my dropbox at https://www.dropbox.com/s/lddxkodfq2ens6c/plain-text.alfredworkflow?dl=0

 

I just created it by using the "Keyword to Script to Notification" template, and set run script to:

• pbpaste | textutil -stdin -stdout -convert txt | tr “” \" |tr ’ \' | pbcopy

I set no escapes, since the script has no input (no {query} parameter)

[jdfwarrior]

Could you share the workflow you have created, it may be a simple case of the script escaping in Alfred.

 

[moved to workflow help]

 

Not sure the issue behind this one but thought I would mention Andrew... I tried several iterations of this and noticed that if I make a script, we'll call it convert.sh that does nothing but set a variable to the output of pbpaste, echo's that, and then also writes the value to a text file also. If I copy the text mentioned above, then run the script from a terminal, I see the text echoed as expected, but the string that's written to the file (just doing a simple echo $output > log.txt) shows the string like this when I use less to view it <D2>You<D5>re smart!<D3>. 

 

There's something weird with those smart quotes. It works as expected when I used a string that didn't contain those things. I wonder if they are getting encoded somehow. The strange thing is though is that, when I call the script from alfred, i'm getting those results. Alfred calls an external script that should do the processing and just returned the cleaned up output.

 

I guess I'm rambling at this point. Just wanted to let you know some of the stuff I tested to see if it could help you track this down.

[Andrew]

Thanks.  I can't see how to attach a file to this forum, so I uploaded it to my dropbox at https://www.dropbox.com/s/lddxkodfq2ens6c/plain-text.alfredworkflow?dl=0

 

I just created it by using the "Keyword to Script to Notification" template, and set run script to:

• pbpaste | textutil -stdin -stdout -convert txt | tr “” \" |tr ’ \' | pbcopy

I set no escapes, since the script has no input (no {query} parameter)

 

I've had a bit of a play with this and come up with the following workflow:

 

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6749767/Alfred/Workflows/Strip%20smart%20quotes.alfredworkflow

 

It allows you to select some text (in e.g. Textedit), hit the hotkey and have the text replaced with the smart quotes removed.

 

Cheers,

Andrew

[kleinfelter]

Thank you.

I have a theory about what causes the problem with the doubling of the quotes (based on nothing but intuition).  They're represented as a UTF-8 multi-byte character sequence.  My guess is that somebody, somewhere is upset that multiple bytes get paired up with a single byte.

 

I'm *guessing* that when I run the command from a shell prompt, it is using a different character set that when it is run from Alfred.  By using php, your version is picking up PHP's default character set.

 

I wonder if there is a way to specify which character set should be used when a shell is run under Alfred?

 

It figures that the first workflow I'd write would bump up against the margins...

Thanks again.

[Andrew]

I wonder if there is a way to specify which character set should be used when a shell is run under Alfred?

 

You may be right... NSTask constrains the UTF-8 normalisation outside of Alfred's control... I wrote a little command line app which helps in this instance in the following thread which also contains discussion about this issue:

 

http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/2015-encoding-issue/

 

Let me know if that helps?

[deanishe]

If you're using command-line tools, text encoding may very well be the problem. Alfred has an empty environment (like all Mac apps), so default encoding is ASCII, not UTF-8. pbcopy and pbpaste in particular will mangle text if the proper encoding isn't set in its environment.

 

Try adding export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 at the top of your script or use LANG=en_US.UTF-8 your command instead of just your command.

Edited February 19, 2015 by deanishe

[kleinfelter]

deanishe - You pegged it.  It worked from my Terminal window because I have LANG set.  It didn't work from Alfred because it wasn't set in the shell Alfred opened.  Setting the encoding to UTF-8 fixed it.

Thanks!