I have a document containing many " marks, but I want to convert it for use in TeX.
TeX uses 2 ` marks for the beginning quote mark, and 2 ' mark for the closing quote mark.
I only want to make changes to these when " appears on a single line in an even number (e.g. there are 2, 4, or 6 "'s on the line). For e.g.
"This line has 2 quotation marks."
--> ``This line has 2 quotation marks.''
"This line," said the spider, "Has 4 quotation marks."
--> ``This line,'' said the spider, ``Has 4 quotation marks.''
"This line," said the spider, must have a problem, because there are 3 quotation marks."
--> (unchanged)
My sentences never break across lines, so there is no need to check on multiple lines.
There are few quotes with single quotes, so I can manually change those.
How can I convert these?
Here's my one-liner using repeated sed's:
cat file.txt | sed -e 's/"\([^"]*\)"/`\1`/g' | sed '/"/s/`/\"/g' | sed -e 's/`\([^`]*\)`/``\1'\'''\''/g'
(note: it won't work correctly if there are already back-ticks (`) in the file but otherwise should do the trick)
Removed back-tick bug by simplifying, now works for all cases:
cat file.txt | sed -e 's/"\([^"]*\)"/``\1'\'\''/g' | sed '/"/s/``/"/g' | sed '/"/s/'\'\''/"/g'
With comments:
cat file.txt # read file
| sed -e 's/"\([^"]*\)"/``\1'\'\''/g' # initial replace
| sed '/"/s/``/"/g' # revert `` to " on lines with extra "
| sed '/"/s/'\'\''/"/g' # revert '' to " on lines with extra "