Disable Auto Quotes in Dreamweaver

I already have Lint enabled and keep an eye on the output tab for errors.

The issue with quoting not working reliably for developers is therefore more than 4 years old. 

The user experience question to ask is "why would developers want to turn off double quoting - it's a useful feature, right?"

The reason is that the feature as implemented naively puts in two single quotes all the time. If you are correcting existing code, and for what ever reason you only have a single quote, as soon as you go to type just one quote auto quotes puts in two single quotes - when you only needed one.

The context that reminded me of this frustration is editing html within a php file. You use a lot of echo statements where you embed php variables within html through concatenation.

A common scenario might be that you initially copied in an actual file name and eventually you'll want to replace it with a filename that is generated from a variable.

You might start of with something like this - perhaps copied directly from an existing prototype where image.jpg is a placeholder.

echo '<img src="image.jpg"/>';

To edit this you have to split the line up to make 'stings'.' joined'.' with' single quotes and dots.

echo '<img src="'.$imageName.'.jpg"/>';

If auto quotes is enabled, every time you want to insert just one single quote, you have two single quotes inserted.

The task becomes a battle with the editor to remove each double insertion.

To start correcting this you first click, say to the right of the first double quote. Tap one single quote on the keyboard you end up with:

echo '<img src="''image.jpg"/>';

In this editing workflow, it is not your intention to type a new fully single quoted string. Since there is already a single quote preceding, I am effectively closing an existing string to the left. In php if I type a dot / period, I'm likely concatenating.

So after you have edited the left side of the image name, you now need to work on the other side.

echo '<img src="'.$image.jpg"/>';

You need to add a concenate operator and then have a closing single quoted string on the right.

With auto quotes you initially end up with

echo '<img src="'.$imageName.''jpg"/>';

However, there was already a closing single quote to the right, so just inserting one quote would close the string. There isn't a need for two.

But if you are typing new code and type a single quote, you actually do want the current automatical behaviour.

Having migrated a pure html file into php, it becomes tedious to have to delete the second single quote. Hence turning it off.

Hopefully this example illustrates why the feature might be considered an incomplete feature for the developer audience.