Smart quotes converter
Swap straight quotes for typographic ones, or strip them back out.
Each quote becomes an opening or closing mark from what sits beside it, and an apostrophe stays an apostrophe — don’t, ’90s, and rock ’n’ roll all come out right. Dashes and ellipses are left exactly as they are. Up to 200,000 characters.
Result
Start typing and the result appears here. No button needed.
Smart quotes converter, without the extra steps.
Turn straight quotes into the typographic ones prose wants, with each mark chosen from what sits beside it — and apostrophes kept as apostrophes, so don’t, ’90s, and rock ’n’ roll all come out right. Or go the other way, which is what a code file, a CSV, or a config needs when a document editor has been through it.
How to use this tool
- 1Paste the text.
- 2Choose curly or straight, and whether dashes and ellipses come along.
- 3Read the counts, then select Copy result.
When Smart quotes converter is the right tool
- A snippet copied out of a document has curly quotes in it and the shell refuses to run it.
- An article written in a plain editor needs proper typographic quotes before it is published.
- A CSV exported from a word processor will not parse, because the quotes around its fields are not straight.
- A draft mixes both kinds after several people have edited it, and it needs to be consistent.
Which mark belongs where is decided by its neighbours
A straight double quote has to become an opening or a closing mark, and only the surrounding characters can say which: after a space, a bracket, or a dash it opens; after a letter or punctuation it closes. Single marks are harder, because most of them are not quotes at all — a mark between letters is an apostrophe, one before digits is an elision, and ’n’ in rock ’n’ roll is two apostrophes rather than a quoted letter. Those cases are handled explicitly, because getting them wrong is the thing that makes converted prose look wrong.
Never run the curly direction on code
Typographic quotes are punctuation; programming languages, shells, JSON, and CSV all need the straight ones. A curly quote in a snippet produces a syntax error, or worse, a string that looks right and is not. That is also the single most common reason to use this tool at all: something has been through a word processor and needs undoing. The straight direction is safe on anything, and the curly direction is for prose only.
Feet and inches are not quotes
5' 10" uses prime and double prime — ′ and ″ — which are their own characters, distinct from both straight and curly quotes. The same is true of minutes and seconds in coordinates. This tool does not guess at inserting them, because a mark after a number is sometimes genuinely a quote; instead it counts every quote that follows a digit and says so, which is enough to find and fix the handful that matter in a document.
A few quick answers.
In ordinary prose, yes. A mark between letters is always an apostrophe, one before a digit is treated as an elision so ’90s is right, and a short list of elided words — ’n’, ’tis, ’em, ’til — is recognised so rock ’n’ roll does not come back with an opening quote in the middle of it.
Because curly quotes are punctuation, not syntax: a compiler or a shell needs straight ones. If a document editor has curled the quotes in a snippet, paste it here and convert to straight, which is exactly what this direction is for. Do not run the curly direction on code.
Those are feet and inches, and the correct characters are the prime marks ′ and ″ rather than curly quotes. The tool converts them as quotes but counts every quote that follows a number and tells you, so you can replace those few by hand.
Not quite. Going curly to straight is exact, since every typographic mark has one straight equivalent. Coming back applies the rules again, which restores ordinary prose correctly but cannot know about a mark that was deliberately unusual — a prime, a quote inside code, or a foreign convention such as German low quotes.
It produces the English convention: double quotes outside, single inside. French guillemets, German low-high quotes, and other national conventions are not generated, and existing ones are left alone in the curly direction. The straight direction converts German low quotes and single-guillemet-style marks to straight quotes along with the rest.
Because they are a different decision. Turning three dots into an ellipsis character is right for prose and wrong in code or a filename, and the two hyphens in a command-line flag must never become an en dash. Keeping them separate means you can fix quotes without touching anything else.