Sunday, July 5, 2009

Double quotes problem in Windows 7

EDIT: Due to big popularity of this post, let me put the solution on top:

If you have a problem with quotes in Windows 7, try to switch the keyboard layout from "United States - International" to "US"
After changing the keyboard layout, you may need to restart your programs or the computer.

ORIGINAL POST:

After installing Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2008, I discovered the following behavior in the code editor:
Pressing the double-quote (") key once would have no effect.
Pressing any key after that would produce both the double quote character and the next character.

The problem was not caused by Visual Studio, but by regional settings - I solved it by switching from "United States - International" to "US" keyboard layout.

Labels: , ,

57 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for that :)

September 24, 2009 at 1:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks!!!

October 5, 2009 at 9:39 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"thanks"...:))

October 8, 2009 at 10:27 AM  
Blogger Flo (dubios.ro) said...

great!

October 28, 2009 at 7:49 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

thanx again!

November 10, 2009 at 10:04 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanx, it works!

November 10, 2009 at 12:45 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks man!

November 15, 2009 at 11:32 AM  
Blogger Saran said...

Thanks :)

November 26, 2009 at 9:30 PM  
Blogger Sam Stone said...

Dekuji mockrat, Jaro! Thanks mate! ;-)

November 27, 2009 at 1:35 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you.

November 29, 2009 at 1:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

thank you!

December 10, 2009 at 11:47 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Thank you!" :)

December 15, 2009 at 5:43 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice one - worked for me too, but only after a reboot

December 21, 2009 at 6:57 PM  
Anonymous milan said...

Thx alot!

December 30, 2009 at 2:03 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

THANK YOU !!!

January 5, 2010 at 3:28 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's nice that someone who knows how to fix a problem just broadcast it.Thank you.

January 6, 2010 at 2:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Big thanks!

January 15, 2010 at 10:11 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

thanks a lot!

February 5, 2010 at 10:27 PM  
Blogger Spidfire said...

Thx maybe we have to report the problem so microsoft can fix it ??

February 9, 2010 at 7:36 PM  
Blogger Jaroslav Klíma said...

There is nothing to fix, this is by design.

February 9, 2010 at 10:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot.

March 3, 2010 at 3:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Don't forget to restart Visual Studio after you change the layout!

March 8, 2010 at 9:15 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

This is really helpful! As a coder, this is really a must do if you got problems with quotes. Anyway, you should add in this brief fix that everyone who tries this fix with no results should do a restart and then check it out. Because I'm sure there are many who encountered this problem and had to restart first.

Just a suggestion :)

March 11, 2010 at 3:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

';-) Easy

March 15, 2010 at 6:54 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

diky moc

March 19, 2010 at 1:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thx dude "!"

March 28, 2010 at 6:44 PM  
Anonymous copy[it]right said...

After years of doing two unnessesary inputs (pressing double-quote twice, and correct the second one with backspace) i finally found the solution by my self, using the very same method. God, i was SO happy that i could normally type the double-quote ONCE to make it appear! :-)

Hopefully this blog article will help many others in-time! Thank you for sharing this with the world ;-)

Best regards (from the Netherlands),
copy[it]right

April 11, 2010 at 2:04 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot. That quotes' behavior was very irritating.

April 24, 2010 at 5:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanx!

June 8, 2010 at 7:13 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you. :)

July 28, 2010 at 6:47 PM  
Blogger bex said...

this is definitely a bug, not a feature :D

September 21, 2010 at 11:13 PM  
Blogger Dries said...

Awesome!

October 4, 2010 at 8:01 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks a lot, this stopped me from cracking my head open by banging it against the wall for several hours.

January 25, 2011 at 6:31 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

1) The same is in WinXP as well as in Win7.
2) Does for simple quotes '' as well as for double "".
3) "nothing to fix, this is by design" - very strange "feature".
4) Exactly as described:
"United States - International" requires double press,
on the other hand, the "English - US" keyboard types a character on each keypress.
5) I had 2 keyboards (en+cs) installed already, so the change took effect immediately:
Win restart not needed for me. (this probably can vary/depend)
6) During thet changing, I had 2 layouts for the en keyboard in the same time.
There appeared additional icon in the "Win main bar": The "EN" icon + a "keyboard" icon,
to change layouts of the same EN keyboard.
7) To be able to remove (unselect/diable) the present "EN-international" layout,
you need to set some other keyboard/layout as a "default", before.

Good luck to every one!

Thank you Jaroslave!

February 6, 2011 at 4:05 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks a lot!
Anyway, I think this is a "workaround" rather than a "solution".
Does anybody know why it behaves that way with the US-International layout?

February 14, 2011 at 9:08 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

in us international if you press the double quotes and then a vowel, it produces ö,ä,ü.. if you press quotes and then a non vowel, it just gives you the quotes + the letter you pressed, eg. "p

so international is basically if you need to produce funny characters. it is too bad this has to be done at the expense of not having proper double quotes. i think if they could work around that, us-international would have been the best standard. but since they haven't you have to stick to simple US.

May 18, 2011 at 3:32 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you!!

June 13, 2011 at 3:53 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Tahnks man :)

July 23, 2011 at 11:32 AM  
Anonymous toop said...

To clarify for those who do not yet understand this behavior: US International is a keyboard setting meant for English-language using people who also frequently have to type the accented characters of various Western European languages (as well as «guillemots», etc). This is achieved by through dead keys, which are used to compose secondary characters. The most common dead keys are " ^ ' ` and ~, corresponding to umlaut (diaeresis), circumflex, acute accent, grave accent and tilde. All of the deadkeys can also be used to produce their ordinary values by pressing a space after. For those of us who use this keyboard layout on purpose, this is second nature. If you've selected this keyboard layout and didn't know what deadkeys are, you should choose a standard English layout; but it's not a bug, its the foundational concept of an international keyboard (it's also not specific to Windows).

September 15, 2011 at 4:10 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you :)

December 1, 2011 at 10:43 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Many thanks!

December 17, 2011 at 5:56 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

many thanks. That is what I am looking for :)

February 15, 2012 at 5:05 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The fix works for the " key, but now the Euro sign key (AltGr + 5) stopped working. Is there a keyboard layout (preferably English-US) that allows for single action "-key behavior along with a working €-sign on the 5-key?

March 8, 2012 at 10:24 AM  
Blogger Jaroslav Klíma said...

Have you tried AltGr+E?

March 8, 2012 at 6:24 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks, dude ;) Double quotes were really annoying thing :)

April 27, 2012 at 11:12 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Děkuji Jaroslave!" Big mystery solved.

August 14, 2012 at 5:35 PM  
Anonymous Thundergod said...

I though that it was a notepad++ thing since I experienced it only there. Anyway thanks! ... It was getting annoying (I had to write 1000 lines of code with that bug just because I was lazy enough to look around google ....)

August 19, 2012 at 11:31 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thank you 'v'

January 3, 2013 at 4:35 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks! very helpful

January 9, 2013 at 9:15 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks!
Shame on M$ for their "hidden-not-asked-useless-features"

January 19, 2013 at 10:29 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks :)

February 5, 2013 at 2:28 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Dakujem velmi pekne! Velmi uzitocna informacia! Este raz vdaka!

February 26, 2013 at 3:35 PM  
Blogger Evan R. Murphy said...

Thank you to commenter toop for explaining how to work around this for those who want to *keep* the United States - International keyboard layout. To create a double quote, press the " key (shift + '), followed by a space.

May 1, 2013 at 7:12 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks so much mate. This was pestering me quite a bit and glad to find a solution finally. Cheers.

June 13, 2013 at 9:54 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Awesome...
Thanx..It was really helpful

October 7, 2013 at 9:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thnks, that really worked, don't forget to restart your programs

November 12, 2013 at 6:08 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

No restart needed, takes effect immediately.

February 5, 2014 at 5:18 PM  

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