Smart quotes for UITextView in Catalyst

Question

ralf.ebert OP

Created Oct ’19

Replies 2

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Hi,

I found that setting textView.smartQuotesType = .no for a UITextView has no effect under Catalyst - it will replace standard quotes with typographic quotes anyway. Which is a bit annoying for an editor that shows code; the only workaround I found so far is to manually replace the quotes back to their original form:

text = text.replacingOccurrences(of: "“", with: "\"").replacingOccurrences(of: "„", with: "\"")

Example project for reproducing the issue: https://github.com/ralfebert/TextViewSmartQuotesExample

Anyone got the same issue/found a solution to disable smart quotes under Catalyst?

Greetings,

Ralf

Boost

Answer 1

hacknicity OP

Oct ’19

Just a guess, but is this due to the Mac Keyboard system preferences that has smart quotes and dashes enabled? There's a "Use smart quotes and dashes" checkbox in System Preferences->Keyboard in the "Text" tab. Is the Mac itself directly entering smart quotes as the user types rather than the iOS/Catalyst app's text view converting them?

You could try turning that off in System Preferences to see if it affects behaviour. Of course, this isn't really a viable solution, but it might at least explain what is happening.

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Answer 2

DerekK19 OP

Apr ’20

I had the same problem. The fix suggested does work (though I replaced the opening double quote with "”" rather than "„", because in NZ we have raised opening quotes). It is indeed a System Preference thing, and I found by turning off Keyboard | Text | Use Smart quotes and dashes I could get back to the standard double quotes. It would be good if it were possible to overide the System Preference in UITextView for people writing code editor apps.

I think though that I've opened a can of worms, because I see that the Keyboard preference has 8 different styles of double quotes

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