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

Posting for posterity.

As suggested by @Steven Dee, I went to Pandoc.

I try to use a mature and tested tool whenever I can versus baking my own regex. Hand built regex's can be overly greedy, or not greedy enough, and they may not be sensitive to word boundaries and commas etc. Pandoc accounts for most this and more.

From the command line (the --smart parameter turns on smart quotes):

pandoc --smart --standalone -o output.html input.html

..and I know a command line script may or may not fit OP's requirement of using Javascript. (related: How to execute shell command in Javascript)