Smart quotes are the curly typographic quotation marks and apostrophes used in polished prose, as opposed to the straight vertical marks on a keyboard. This tool converts between the two in either direction, and optionally handles dashes and ellipses.
How it works
Going straight to curly, the converter decides opening versus closing from context:
" → “ (opening) if preceded by start/space/( else ” (closing)
' → ‘ (opening) in the same positions, else ’ (closing/apostrophe)
-- → — (em dash) ... → … (ellipsis)Going curly to straight simply maps every curly variant back to its ASCII form, and the em dash and ellipsis back to -- and .... Apostrophes inside words, such as in don't, always become the closing curly single quote.
Example and tips
"It's here" -- done... becomes “It’s here” — done… in curly mode, and reverses cleanly in straight mode. Use curly quotes for anything people read and straight quotes for anything a machine parses. If a JSON file or command line breaks mysteriously, run it through curly-to-straight first to catch a stray smart quote pasted from a document.