Smart → Straight Quotes
Replace curly typographic quotes with their straight ASCII equivalents. Handles all common variants.
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About Smart → Straight Quotes
Smart quotes (also called curly or typographic quotes) — “like these” and ‘these’ — are pretty in prose but break code, configs, and JSON. This tool replaces every smart quote variant with the straight ASCII equivalent ( " or ' ), making the result safe for any system that expects ASCII quotes.
When to use it
- Cleaning text pasted from Word, Pages, or Google Docs before using it as code or JSON
- Stripping typographic quotes from a SQL query that was copy-pasted from documentation
- Normalizing user-submitted text before storing it in a database
- Removing curly quotes from a CSV that breaks parsers expecting ASCII
How it works
A regex replaces all curly double-quote variants (U+201C, U+201D, U+201E, U+201F) with ASCII " and all curly single-quote variants (U+2018, U+2019, U+201A, U+201B, U+2032, U+2035) with ASCII '. Other typography (em-dashes, en-dashes, ellipses) is preserved — use the dash converter if you also need to convert those.
Examples
Curly quotes → ASCII
“Hello,” she said. It’s a test.
"Hello," she said. It's a test.
Frequently asked questions
- Which characters are replaced?
- Curly double quotes (“ ” „ ‟), curly single quotes (‘ ’ ‚ ‛), and the prime characters often used as apostrophes (′ ‵) all become ASCII " or '.
- Will the apostrophes in It's, don't, etc. be straightened?
- Yes. The right-single-quotation-mark (U+2019), which Word uses for apostrophes in contractions, becomes a straight ASCII apostrophe (').
- Does it touch em-dashes or ellipses?
- No. Only quote characters are converted. Use the dash converter for em-dash and en-dash, and find-and-replace for ellipses.