Smart Quotes Converter

In short Smart quotes are the typographic curly forms — “ ” for double and ‘ ’ for single — as opposed to the straight ASCII " and ' that a keyboard produces. Converting in either direction is a common need for opposite reasons. Going to curly is typography: published prose uses directional quotes, and the opening and closing forms are different characters that lean the right way. Going to straight is a bug fix, because a curly apostrophe pasted into code is not the apostrophe the parser expects and produces a syntax error that is genuinely hard to see, and a curly quote in a CSV breaks the field parsing. This tool leaves code inside backticks untouched for exactly that reason, which is what makes it safe to run on a document that mixes prose and code samples. The hard part of going straight-to-curly is the apostrophe, since the same character marks a contraction, a possessive and a closing single quote, and in "'twas" it is an opening apostrophe that should curl the other way — a rule almost every automatic converter gets wrong.