Converting ″Straight Quotes″ to “Curly Quotes”

Question

I have an application which uses a Javascript-based rules engine. I need a way to convert regular straight quotes into curly (or smart) quotes. It’d be easy to just do a <

Answer 1

You might want to look at what Pandoc does—apparently with the --smart option, it handles quotes properly in all cases (including e.g. ’tis and ’twere).

I recently wrote a Javascript typography prettification engine that does, among other things, quote replacement; I wound up using basically the algorithm suggested by Renesis, but there’s currently a failing test up waiting for a smarter solution.

If you’re interested in cribbing my code (and/or submitting a patch based on work you’ve done), check it out: jsPrettify. jsprettify.prettifyStr does what you’re looking for. If you don’t want to deal with the Closure dependency, there’s an older version that runs on its own—it even works in Rhino.