Fixing broken sentences.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cybmole

i have fixed up several more books & finally realised that all I should be testing is whether a "line" ends as a well formed sentence i.e. with a full stop, a quote, or an exclamation mark.

Or a quote mark (in any flavour: ', ", », ’, ”; including German versions: “, ‘, «), or a closing parenthesis (or bracket), or a dash, or a colon, or a question mark, or an ellipsis (…, as a single character), or the HTML entity for any of them (which ends in a semicolon)...

[cybmole]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Or a quote mark (in any flavour: ', ", », ’, ”; including German versions: “, ‘, «), or a closing parenthesis (or bracket), or a dash, or a colon, or a question mark, or an ellipsis (…, as a single character), or the HTML entity for any of them (which ends in a semicolon)...

well OK, but
I mentioned quote ( mark) -

I am not fussed about foreign version - I only read English text.....

question mark is a fair cop....

when I was taught English grammar at school, then colon and dash were not valid sentence endings -

I would not necessarily expect a line feed to follow either of those - the 3 dot ellipses will be caught by the test for a single full stop -

I am not convinced that a line feed should always follow an ellipses ( which is good as that would be a hard case to add to the regex ! )

I guess there will never be "one regex to rule them all" but I am happy if I can automate 99% of repairs

PS. according to this link
http://grammar.about.com/od/punctuat...punctrules.htm
there are only 3 valid ways to end an English sentence.

but of course - not all authors/publishers abide by the rules....

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by cybmole

I mentioned quote ( mark)

True, I missed it, sorry.

when I was taught English grammar at school, then colon and dash were not valid sentence endings

Yet you'll find them in many books, often to introduce a character's speech or some song or poetry.

I would not necessarily expect a line feed to follow either of those - the 3 dot ellipses will be caught by the test for a single full stop

I don't say that a line feed must follow them, but that it may, without being incorrect. And with ellipsis I mean the single character for the three dots, not the three dots as three characters, this is not found with the full stop.

I guess there will never be "one regex to rule them all" but I am happy if I can automate 99% of repairs

I agree. My point is that it's always good to check each occurrence, and not trust automatic search and replace.

PS. according to this link
http://grammar.about.com/od/punctuat...punctrules.htm
there are only 3 valid ways to end an English sentence.

I'd say that is overly simplistic in the context of a full book, at least for considering where a "paragraph break" can occur.

[cybmole]

i thought I had this all figure out & them I come across

Mr.
Smith and Mrs.
Jones

which should be one line not 3.

( names have been changed ). I have a book with line feeds after both Mr. and Mrs. - not sure If I put them there or if they were there all along... or if calibre structure detect did it...

I guess there's also Doc. Smith & Prof. Jones to worry about but let's not get too carried way...