Eric Pierce wrote:
Apologies if this has been brought up before, but I am curious about the status of automatic replacement of dashes in the wikitext (in particular -- and ---) with HTML-entity versions that many users seem to like so much (ndash and mdash). I noticed that a while back (February 2004) such a conversion was implemented, but apparently reverted due to undesirable breakage. Any way it could be reinstated? I may look into it once I get familiar with the code.
That conversion consisted of two lines of code:
$text = str_replace( "---", "—", $text ); $text = str_replace( "--", "–", $text );
These were inserted near the start of the wikitext->HTML transformation. The biggest problem in my mind was that it breaks links. Perhaps the way to avoid this would be to act on HTML instead of wikitext, and to only replace dashes which occur outside HTML tags.
The current status is that I have other things to do and nobody else has volunteered.
-- Tim Starling