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Radar · Go · Archive · Week 29 · Jul 13 – 19, 2026

cmd/gofmt: don't rewrite into smart quotes

Nice to knowtooling

What changed
go fmt and go doc will no longer convert plain quotes into smart quotes.
Production impact
The source does not say.
Try it
Run go fmt on a file that contains straight quotes and observe that they are preserved.
Source
github.com/golang/go/issues/76975

Understand it, then run it

go fmt used to replace plain quotation marks in comments with “smart” quotes. The change stops that conversion. Now the text you write in a comment stays exactly as you typed it. This means your source files no longer contain invisible “fancy” characters that were added automatically.

Run it now

Todaygo
// This program shows that go/format no longer rewrites plain quotes into smart quotes.
// It formats a source string that contains smart quotes and prints the result unchanged.
package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"go/format"
)

func main() {
	// Source code with smart quotes (U+201C and U+201D) in a comment.
	src := []byte(`package main
// “Hello, world!” – a comment with smart quotes
func main() {}`)

	// Format the source. If smart quotes were rewritten, the output would differ.
	formatted, err := format.Source(src)
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Println("format error:", err)
		return
	}

	// Print the formatted source to show that smart quotes are preserved.
	fmt.Println(string(formatted))
}

What it printed when we ran it on Go 1.27.1

package main

// “Hello, world!” – a comment with smart quotes
func main() {}

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Written by gpt-oss-20b from the linked source · claims checked against the sources · archive, not individually reviewed