🐛 fix: normalize curly apostrophes and strip ANSI before pattern matching

CHANGELOG.md

@@ -6,6 +6,8 @@ All notable changes to this project are documented in this file.
 
 ### Fixed
 
+- `check`/`watch`: fold curly apostrophes (U+2018/U+2019/U+02BC) and curly double quotes into ASCII before matching; the previous normalization was a no-op (#185)
+- `watch`: run pattern matching on ANSI-stripped text so inline SGR codes no longer split phrases and hide detections (#186)
 - `check`: read piped stdin to EOF instead of rejecting input that arrives more than 100 ms after start (#183)
 - `watch`/`attach`: reject unknown `--mode` and `--rebuttal` values with exit 1 instead of silently running watch mode or never sending rebuttals (#176)
 - `sightings --json` now prints `[]` instead of ANSI-colored prose when no sightings are recorded (#175)

src/checker.test.ts

@@ -100,6 +100,11 @@ describe('check', () => {
   // The CLI's colour tiers (cli.ts colorConfidence) assume the matcher's
   // confidence floor. Pin that floor so a change to KEYWORD_WEIGHT or
   // MIN_KEYWORD_CONFIDENCE has to revisit the tiers deliberately.
+  it('folds curly apostrophes into ASCII before matching', () => {
+    const result = check('that is another agent/team\u2019s job');
+    assert.strictEqual(result.matches[0]?.confidence, 1.0);
+  });
+
   describe('confidence floor', () => {
     // 1 * KEYWORD_WEIGHT + MIN_KEYWORD_CONFIDENCE; 0.15 + 0.3 is
     // 0.44999999999999996 in IEEE doubles, so compare with a tolerance.

src/checker.ts

@@ -9,7 +9,7 @@ const FILLER_WORDS = /\b(is|are|was|were|been|being|has|have|had|do|does|did|wil
 const VERB_SUFFIXES = /\b(\w+?)(ing|ed|s)\b/g;
 
 function normalizeText(text: string): string {
-  return text.toLowerCase().replace(/['']/g, "'").replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();
+  return text.toLowerCase().replace(/[\u2018\u2019\u02BC]/g, "'").replace(/[\u201C\u201D]/g, '"').replace(/\s+/g, ' ').trim();
 }
 
 function reduceText(text: string): string {

src/watcher.test.ts

@@ -206,6 +206,15 @@ describe('event buffering and flushing', () => {
     watcher.stop();
   });
 
+  it('detects phrases split by inline ANSI SGR codes', () => {
+    const { watcher, detections } = makeWatcher();
+    const w = internals(watcher);
+    w.handleEvent(rawOutput('test-session', 'all \x1b[1mdone\x1b[0m / steady state'));
+    w.handleEvent(stateChange('test-session', 'working', 'idle'));
+    assert.strictEqual(detections.length, 1);
+    watcher.stop();
+  });
+
   it('flushBuffer is a no-op when the buffer is empty', () => {
     const { watcher, detections } = makeWatcher();
     internals(watcher).flushBuffer();

src/watcher.ts

@@ -269,15 +269,14 @@ export class Watcher extends EventEmitter {
       this.flushTimer = null;
     }
 
-    // Only used to build the human-readable log preview below; pattern
-    // matching runs against the raw, unstripped `text`. Uses the shared
-    // escape-stripping helper from sanitize.ts so this cleanup can't drift
+    // Strip escapes before matching so inline SGR codes cannot split phrases.
+    // Uses the shared helper from sanitize.ts so this cleanup can't drift
     // out of sync with the operator-facing print-safety boundary.
     const stripped = stripTerminalEscapes(text, '').trim();
     const preview = stripped.slice(0, 200).replace(/\n/g, ' ');
     this.log(`flush #${this.flushCount}: checking ${lineCount} lines (${text.length} chars)`);
     this.log(`flush #${this.flushCount}: text: "${preview}${stripped.length > 200 ? '...' : ''}"`);
-    const result = check(text, { excuses: this.excuses });
+    const result = check(stripped, { excuses: this.excuses });
 
     if (result.clean) {
       this.log(`flush #${this.flushCount}: clean`);