Text Mining R Package & Regex to handle Replace Smart Curly Quotes

Question

I\'ve got a bunch of texts like this below with different smart quotes - for single and double quotes. All I could end up with the packages I\'m aware of is to remove those

Answer 1

Use two gsub operations: 1) to replace double curly quotes, 2) to replace single quotes:

> gsub("[“”]", "\"", gsub("[‘’]", "'", text))
[1] "You don't get \"your\" money's worth"

See the online R demo. Tested in both Linux and Windows, and works the same.

The [“”] construct is a positive character class that matches any single char defined in the class.

To normalize all chars similar to double quotes, you might want to use

> sngl_quot_rx = "[ʻʼʽ٬‘’‚‛՚︐]"
> dbl_quot_rx = "[«»““”„‟≪≫《》〝〞〟\＂″‶]"
> res = gsub(dbl_quot_rx, "\"", gsub(sngl_quot_rx, "'", `Encoding<-`(text, "UTF8"))) 
> cat(res, sep="\n")
You don't get "your" money's worth

Here, [«»““”„‟≪≫《》〝〞〟＂″‶] matches

«   00AB  LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
»   00BB  RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
“   05F4  HEBREW PUNCTUATION GERSHAYIM
“   201C  LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
”   201D  RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
„   201E  DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
‟   201F  DOUBLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK
≪  226A  MUCH LESS-THAN
≫  226B  MUCH GREATER-THAN
《  300A  LEFT DOUBLE ANGLE BRACKET
》  300B  RIGHT DOUBLE ANGLE BRACKET
〝  301D  REVERSED DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK
〞  301E  DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK
〟  301F  LOW DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK
＂  FF02  FULLWIDTH QUOTATION MARK
″   2033  DOUBLE PRIME
‶   2036  REVERSED DOUBLE PRIME

The [ʻʼʽ٬‘’‚‛՚︐] is used to normalize some chars similar to single quotes:

ʻ  02BB  MODIFIER LETTER TURNED COMMA
ʼ  02BC  MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE
ʽ  02BD  MODIFIER LETTER REVERSED COMMA
٬  066C  ARABIC THOUSANDS SEPARATOR
‘  2018  LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
’  2019  RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
‚  201A  SINGLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
‛  201B  SINGLE HIGH-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK
՚   055A  ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE
︐  FE10  PRESENTATION FORM FOR VERTICAL COMMA