Smart quotes normalizer

Word processors and many websites automatically replace straight quotes with typographic curly quotes, hyphens with dashes and three dots with an ellipsis character. That looks nice in prose but breaks code, command lines, JSON, CSV files, database imports and search. This tool converts typographic characters to their plain ASCII equivalents, or the other way round for publishing.

How to use it

1. Paste the text.
2. Choose the direction: smart to plain ASCII, or plain to smart.
3. Copy the result.

What gets converted

• Curly double quotes “ ” (U+201C, U+201D) become straight double quotes.
• Curly single quotes and apostrophes ‘ ’ (U+2018, U+2019) become straight apostrophes.
• En dash – (U+2013) and em dash — (U+2014) become a hyphen or two hyphens.
• Ellipsis … (U+2026) becomes three dots.
• Non-breaking spaces can become normal spaces.

Why it matters

• Code and shell commands: a command copied from a blog with curly quotes, such as echo ‘hello’, fails because the shell does not recognise them as quotes.
• JSON and config files: curly quotes make files invalid.
• Search and matching: don’t with a curly apostrophe does not match don't with a straight one.
• Legacy systems that only support ASCII or Latin-1 show these characters as garbage.

The other direction

Converting straight to smart quotes gives polished typography for articles, books and presentations. The tool decides between opening and closing quotes from context, such as a quote following a space being an opening quote. Always proofread apostrophes in abbreviations like ’90s, which should use a closing-style apostrophe.