Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby
I'm afraid it's not so, you can have ‘single’ words or phrases between quotes, not to mention mistakes where the punctuation may be missing.
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Mistakes, yes, but you are also right about ‘single’ words, I hadn't been thinking properly. Also titles can be put in quotes, like:
A faint type of both characters may be found in the Surinam Yarico of Captain John Gabriel Stedman, whose ‘Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition’ appeared in 1796.
So, I guess, it cannot be done without manual checking. Am I right that an apostroph at the end of a word will only appear after an s? If that's true, then it should be possible to search for [sS]’[ .,;:!?—] (shouldn't be
too many) and replace the ones that are closing quotes with an unambiguous placeholder -- and for the rest the rule "if followed or preceded by a letter it's an apostrophe" applies?
Does this work now?