Publishers and typesetters use curly typographic quotes (“ ” ‘ ’) because they read as polished, professional prose. Code, JSON, CSV, and shell commands need straight quotes ( ” ’ ) because curly characters break string parsing. This converter goes both ways, so you can move text between a CMS and an editor without retyping.
How it works
Straight to smart scans each straight quote and decides opening versus closing from the character right before it. A double quote at the start of the text, or after whitespace or an opening bracket like (, [, {, becomes an opening “; anything else becomes a closing ”. Single quotes follow the same rule for ‘ and ’, with one extra step: an apostrophe that follows a letter or digit (such as the one in it's) is always rendered as a closing ’, the correct typographic apostrophe.
Smart to straight does a plain character swap — every curly double-quote variant (“ ” „ ‟) becomes ", and every curly single-quote variant (‘ ’ ‚ ‛) becomes '.
Example
Input: "Hello," she said. 'It's fine,' he replied.
Straight-to-smart output:
“Hello,” she said. ‘It’s fine,’ he replied.
The leading " becomes “ (start of text), the " after the comma becomes ” (follows a letter), and the apostrophe in It's becomes ’ because it sits between two letters.
| Straight | Opening | Closing |
|---|---|---|
" | “ | ” |
' | ‘ | ’ |
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