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

The following just changes every quote by alternating (this specific example however would leave out the orphaned quotes).

str.replace(/\"([^\"]*)\"/gi,"“$1”");

Works perfectly, as long as the text you're texturizing isn't already screwed up with improper use of the double quote. In English, quotes are never nested.