bug#48192: forward-word and friends have inconsistent behaviour with Unicode and ASCII punctuation

[Daphne Preston-Kendal]

I should note that I just tried to reproduce this bug in a different
buffer in emacs -q, and the behaviour this time was consistently the one
I describe for the curly quotes below; then when I restarted again
without -q, it was behaving like that consistently in all buffers again.
Pfui. (Sorry, I should have documented my environment more thoroughly
before submitting this bug report. I don’t know any more what was
causing the inconsistency.)

However, the behaviour of considering "don't", "can't" etc. and almost
any English possessive as two words for the purposes of count-words etc.
is undoubtedly wrong for most users in my book. However, I appreciate
there are cross-linguistic issues here, and French speakers would be
equally annoyed if "l'allemand" started to count as one word, not two.
(Thanks to John Cowan for this example.)

On 3 May 2021, at 16:37, Daphne Preston-Kendal <dpk@nonceword.org> wrote:

> forward-word, backward-word etc. have inconsistent behaviour when
> applied to text containing ASCII straight quotation marks vs. Unicode
> quotation marks. The word
>    don't
> with a straight quote (U+0027) counts as a single word, and forward-word
> and backward-word will move over the whole thing. Meanwhile,
>    don’t
> with a curly quote (U+2019) counts as two words, and the cursor will
> stop at ‘don’ and ‘t’ separately. (Fundamental mode, Emacs 27.2.)
> 
> This also means count-words/count-words-region give surprising results
> when applied to text containing Unicode curly apostrophes, since they
> work by counting the number of times the cursor can move
> forward-word-strictly between given start and end points. (Since it uses
> forward-word-strictly and not forward-word, the problem can’t be solved
> by customizing find-word-boundary-function-table.)
> 
> The Right Thing in my view would be for Emacs to use the Unicode TR29
> word boundary rules to work out where to put the cursor when
> forward-word and backward-word are invoked. They handle punctuation
> characters correctly, and rules are not too complicated.
> <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/#Word_Boundaries>
> However, how this would interact with the existing
> find-word-boundary-function-table customization method, I don’t know.
> CLDR makes customizations of the rules for specific (human) languages;
> perhaps they could be ported into Emacs somehow.
> 
> As a temporary workaround to get correct-ish word counts for my
> documents, I’ve hacked up a function that uses how-many instead of
> forward-word to count the number of words in a region.
> <https://gitlab.com/dpk/dotfiles/-/blob/master/.emacs.d/lisp/wc-mode.el>