Check for footnote caller/reference before or after punctuation

Question

(Also see this thread.)

Most publications that I read in English (including English Wikipedia) put footnote callers outside punctuation:

• “Like this!”,* he said \ * or that.
• Not “Like this*!”, he said \ * or that.

(I guess they’re outside because otherwise they create and ugly gap between the text and the punctuation that immediately follows. On the other hand, when the caller is outside quotation marks, that makes it look like the footnote refers to the entire quotation, when it may only refer to the last word or phrase.)

Anyway, it would be nice to be able to check the consistency of these, whether your preferred style is outside or inside.

Like the “also see …” I have referred to above, I guess there’s no built-in check for this. If I write a regex for it, I’ll add it to this thread.

Answer 1

This expression should work:

> regex:\\[xf]\*\p{P}

This says look for any x* or f* followed by Unicode punctuation. If you didn’t want the cross references you could simply remove the x.

Comments

Should that not be:

regex:[xf]*\p{P}

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This email list just removed the backslash from before the asterisk.

regex:[xf]--*\p{P}

(remove the hyphens before and after the \ )

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regex:[xf]\*\p{P} will also work. It just doesn’t mach the backslash before the x* or f* markers.