PowerShell 7 treats typographic quotes as string delimiters

Symptom

A script assembles localized text (release notes, issue bodies, e-mail copy):

$body = "After clicking „Reserve vehicle“ the driver sees a banner…"

and dies with a parser error in the middle of the sentence:

ParserError: Unexpected token 'Reserve' in expression or statement.

Replacing one kind of curly quote with another doesn't help.

Cause

PowerShell's parser accepts Unicode typographic quotes as string delimiters, equivalent to their ASCII cousins:

• “ (U+201C), ” (U+201D), „ (U+201E) all behave like "
• ‘ (U+2018), ’ (U+2019) behave like '

So a double-quoted string containing „ ends right there, and the rest of your prose is parsed as code. Any language whose typography uses these marks (German, Czech, and curly-quoted English from Word) triggers it.

Fix

Text with typographic quotes goes into a single-quoted here-string — fully verbatim, no interpolation, no escaping, newlines included:

$body = @'
After clicking „Reserve vehicle“ the driver sees a banner…

Shipped in 1.2.0.
'@

(The closing '@ must start at column 0.)

Notes

• A plain single-quoted '…' string also tolerates the double-quote family — but has no escape for newlines, so multi-line text gets ugly fast. Here-strings are the habit worth building.
• If the text needs variable interpolation, interpolate around the verbatim parts ($intro + $body) rather than switching the body to @"…"@.
• Related, same character family, different tool: typographic quotes in JSX attributes.
• In JSON the same characters bite differently, and the obvious fix bites again. An unmatched pair — opening „ (U+201E) with a closing ASCII " — ends the JSON string early and JSON.parse fails. The instinct is a bulk regex like /„([^"]*)"/, but that also matches older, perfectly valid lines where the quote was escaped (\"), turning them into \“: a backslash followed by a typographic quote, which is not a valid escape sequence. The file parses worse than before. Count both shapes first (\" vs. bare "), limit the replacement to the block you just added, and re-run JSON.parse after every batch — validation belongs after each pass, not at the end.