How to quote material that ends sections with semicolons

You should first know that there are two systems, the American and the British.

Punctuating Around Quotation Marks

I If you adhere to the American way to write this, that is, the punctuation needed in the paragraph that includes your quote goes into the quote (not logical and recognized by some Americans to be abnormal, but the practice is solidly anchored in American writing habits) there is no solution.

If you start a new sentence and use an upper case letter, a semicolon is not a possibility.

• "This is an example of the quoted text from the report where this section ends with a semicolon;" The next thing is […] ♦ This is chaotic because according to the American way you consider that the semicolon shows the end of the sentence (and is not the end character of the quote); however, the upper case letter tells the reader that something is not right: they'll suppose that there is an error either in the semicolon or in the spelling.

If you do not start a sentence and therefore use a lower case letter the semicolon will be automatically interpreted as belonging to the paragraph.

• "This is an example of the quoted text from the report where this section ends with a semicolon;" the next thing is […]

If you place the punctuation pertaining to paragraph inside the quote you have the pairs ";.", ";;", ";?", ";!", ";…". ♦ This is not found in written material in English and will result only in confusing the reader, whether American or other.

II If you adhere to the British way to write this, that is, the punctuation needed in the paragraph that includes your quote goes outside the quote (which is the logical way) there is no problem.

• […] where this section ends with a semicolon;"; the next thing is […]
• […] where this section ends with a semicolon;". The next thing is […]
• […] where this section ends with a semicolon;"! The next thing is […]
• …

The general difference between the American system and the British system is that in the British system, you don't put punctuation inside quotes unless there was punctuation there in the original sentence.

Is there any reason to retain the semi-colon in your quote? As far as I can tell, it doesn't have any semantic significance—that is, dropping it does not change the meaning of the quoted material. (If it did, you would be required to retain it.)

So both the American system and the British system, as I understand them, would drop the semicolon, so your sentence should end with a period and a quote. The question is: which should be first.

Let's say you wanted to quote the sentence

I don't know; I'm still making up my mind.

In the American system, you always put periods inside quotes, so the quoted sentence would be:

He told me, "I don't know."

In the British system, you generally put punctuation inside the quote if it was part of the original sentence (although some publishers change periods to commas and keep them inside the quotes). So the sentence with the quote might be:

He told me, "I don't know".

It's quite possible that some British publishers believe that semicolons should be converted to periods inside the quote if the quote ends the sentence (since many British publishers allow the conversion of periods to commas), in which case they would end up with the same sentence as in the American system.