Smart Quote Converter

How to convert curly quotes to straight quotes

Paste the text and copy the result. Curly to straight is the default because it is the direction that fixes things: every left and right quote, apostrophe and prime becomes the plain ASCII character.

Going the other way, straight to curly, gives you typographic quotes for prose. The tool works out which end of the pair each one belongs to.

Why smart quotes break code

Because a curly quote is not a quote, as far as any parser is concerned. It is a different character with a different code point.

The failure is nastier than it sounds because the line looks right. A parser hunting for the ASCII quote never finds a closing one, so the string runs on and the error surfaces somewhere else entirely. You end up staring at a line that reads perfectly.

The usual sources are Word, Google Docs and any language model, all of which apply typographic quotes automatically. Paste from any of them into a code editor, a CSV file, a JSON payload or a terminal and something downstream refuses it.

Which quote goes where

Going curly to straight needs no thinking: each character has exactly one ASCII equivalent.

The other direction has to guess, because a straight quote carries no information about which end of the pair it is. The rule is position: a quote following a space, a line start or an opening bracket is opening, and every other one is closing. That handles the cases that matter, including an apostrophe inside a word and a single quote nested straight after a double one.

One exception is coded in on purpose. An apostrophe before a digit, as in the '90s, opens after a space and is still an apostrophe, so it curls the closing way.

The one case it gets wrong

Feet and inches. In 5'10" both marks are primes, not quotes, and nothing in the text around them says so. Going straight to curly they get curled like any other pair.

Nothing can fix that without understanding the sentence, which is why the tools that claim otherwise are guessing. Curly to straight has no such problem, so if your text mixes measurements and quotes, run it in that direction only.

What else came with the quotes

Text carrying curly quotes almost always carries more. The same paste usually brings em dashes, a single-character ellipsis and a few non-breaking spaces, because they all come from the same autocorrect or the same model.

The AI text cleaner handles the whole set in one pass. If something still breaks after that, the invisible character detector shows what is actually in there, character by character.

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