A campaign against typographic imperialism & character corruption
The People's Republic of ASCII — Est. 1963
Identify the enemies & allies of the revolution
The impostor. Masquerades as a backtick to sabotage your shell commands. An agent of typographic imperialism.
The bourgeois quotation marks. Inserted by capitalist word processors to undermine the working coder.
The true backtick. Loyal servant of the shell. Template literal comrade. Command substitution hero.
The people's quotation marks. ASCII originals. Unadorned, functional, equal for all programmers.
How typographic imperialism infiltrates your code
Honest, straight quotes typed on an honest keyboard. All is well in the People's Republic of ASCII.
The code is pasted into a blog post, chat message, documentation tool, or AI assistant.
The platform's “smart quote” feature performs unauthorized character substitution. " becomes “, ' becomes ’, ` becomes ´.
An unsuspecting comrade copies the corrupted text and pastes it into their editor.
SyntaxError. Unexpected token. The parser sees only gibberish. Hours of debugging follow.
By order of the International Commission for Character Stability
wptexturize() — Automatic corruption
AutoFormat — Quote replacement on by default
System-wide smart quote substitution
Renders all code blocks with curly quotes
Smart quotes enabled by default
Converts pasted code to rich text
Occasionally outputs curly quotes in code
Study these cases, Comrade. Learn to spot the infiltrators.
print(“Hello, World!”) name = ‘Comrade’
print("Hello, World!")
name = 'Comrade'
const msg = ´Hello ${name}´;
console.log(“done”);
const msg = `Hello ${name}`;
console.log("done");
{ “name”: “value” }
{ "name": "value" }
echo “$(date)” FILES=´ls *.txt´
echo "$(date)" FILES=`ls *.txt`
font-family: “Helvetica Neue”;
font-family: "Helvetica Neue";
In 2024, Microsoft's own internal tooling suffered a catastrophic failure when a configuration file containing smart quotes was deployed across the Office division. The curly quotes, silently inserted by their own software, broke authentication tokens and locked engineers out of their own systems.
The irony was not lost on the International Commission for Character Stability: Microsoft's own product — the very originator of aggressive smart quote substitution — had turned against its creators.
“I have no tools because I've destroyed my tools with my tools.”
The incident lasted several hours and affected thousands of engineers. It has since been classified as Exhibit A in the UCO's case against typographic imperialism.
Instruments of the revolution
Type or paste a character for official evaluation
Paste contaminated text for cleansing
Prove your allegiance to straight quotes
By order of the United Characters Organization
All citizens shall install the Gremlins Tracker extension for VS Code. This tool highlights invisible and non-ASCII characters that have infiltrated your source files.
ext install nhoizey.gremlins
The extension reveals zero-width spaces, smart quotes, and other character saboteurs.
All JavaScript projects shall enforce the quotes rule to reject non-ASCII quotation marks at the linting stage.
"rules": {
"quotes": ["error", "single"],
"no-irregular-whitespace": "error"
}
WordPress administrators shall immediately neutralize the wptexturize function, the single greatest source of smart quote contamination on the internet.
// Add to functions.php
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_title', 'wptexturize');
All Mac users shall navigate to System Settings → Keyboard → Text Replacements and disable “Use smart quotes and dashes” immediately.
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticQuoteSubstitutionEnabled -bool false defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool false
The Commission acknowledges, with considerable irony, that PowerShell uses the backtick (`) as its escape character instead of the backslash. This means PowerShell developers handle more backticks per capita than any other group, and are therefore most vulnerable to acute accent infiltration.
The UCO extends special protective status to PowerShell developers. Extra vigilance is required.
The Backtick Accords — Official Character Registry
| Char | Name | Unicode | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| ´ | Acute Accent | U+00B4 | ✕ |
| ‘ | Left Single Curly Quote | U+2018 | ✕ |
| ’ | Right Single Curly Quote | U+2019 | ✕ |
| “ | Left Double Curly Quote | U+201C | ✕ |
| ” | Right Double Curly Quote | U+201D | ✕ |
| ` | Grave Accent (Backtick) | U+0060 | ★ |
| ' | Apostrophe / Single Quote | U+0027 | ★ |
| " | Quotation Mark / Double Quote | U+0022 | ★ |