EM-pty messages on iPhone
November 10, 2017 9:03 AM   Subscribe

My partner and I just got new iPhone SEs. When she texts me a message with an em-dash, (typing two hyphens autocorrects it into an em dash, which never happened on the iPhone 5...) I can see the text that follows initially, but when I scroll back up to the message, everything after the em dash has disappeared. Is this a feature or a bug?

Example: this morning she texted the following: "Baby -- what is the name of the person who is in charge of [thing]?"

The message on my lock screen appeared as "Baby --" with no text following the em dash.

When I unlocked my phone and looked in the Messages app, I saw the entire message. After I replied, however, the conversation looked like this:

Her: baby --
Me: [my response]


This isn't an isolated thing -- every em-dash-containing message I've gotten since I got this new phone has done the same thing.

Is this a feature? Is there a way to turn it off?
posted by coppermoss to Technology (3 answers total)
 
You can turn off “Smart Punctuation” with the toggle switch at Settings --> General --> Keyboard --> Smart Punctuation. That will keep double-dashes as two dashes, rather than an autocorrected em-dash.

I have been getting those em-dashes with the new ios but haven’t run into the issue you’ve described on the lockscreen. Sounds a lot like a bug; I cannot imagine what feature would hide part of a text message from a preview / lockscreen view.
posted by miles per flower at 9:36 AM on November 10, 2017


FWIW, Apple just pushed out an iOS 11 update this week to correct another text/type bug. You might want to apply it and see if it corrects the problem.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:40 AM on November 10, 2017


Looks to be a known issue: And the workaround is exactly as miles per flower suggested: disable smart punctuation.
posted by matsho at 11:09 AM on November 10, 2017


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