xychange won't recognize an em-dash

Question

I am trying to write a xychange transformation that matches on an em-dash that is preceded or followed by a space and outputs an em-dash without the space. Transforming Data doc (Table 3-2) shows several ways to represent an em-dash but I can't get my match to recognize any of them. Seems simple enough but apparently too tough for me... Can anyone help?

Steve Piercey · Accepted Answer

Notepad++ is pretty smart about the unicode encodings. So it understands the various U+2014, &#8212;, etc and also UTF-8 My guess is that the file is UTF-8 encoded and the 'dash' is actually encoded as three hex bytes. "ttinput" is one way to dump the raw bytes of the file, and I think you will find something like e28094 (as hex) or some octal or decimal equivalent So your xychange table would have to match the bytes exactly since it does not understand UTF-8

Jay Baldwin · Answer

And you also learned that Bart and I can be very silly.

Jonathan Dagresta · Answer

I believe you would use this sequence in your xychange rule: ^e2^80^94 
 And Bart has a good point (about using one of the alternative ways to do a transformation); classic xychange pre-dated the UTF-8 world of things. But it can be done.

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xychange won't recognize an em-dash

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