Free generator, copy and paste
Smart quotes to straight quotes curly in, code-safe out
Word, Google Docs, Pages and AI tools curl your quotes. Code, terminals and spreadsheets want them straight. Paste your text and copy whichever version you need.
- straight quotes
- code-safe ASCII
- curly quotes
Updated · strikethroughtext.online
Three versions of your text
- Straight quotes swaps only the quote marks. Curly doubles, low-9 quotes („), guillemets (« ») and double primes (″) become “. Curly singles, apostrophes, angle singles (‹ ›) and primes (′) become ’. Nothing else changes.
- Code-safe ASCII goes further for code, data and terminals: dashes become hyphens, … becomes three dots, • becomes *, and hidden characters such as zero-width spaces and no-break spaces are cleaned out.
- Curly quotes goes the other way, for print, slides and anything that should look typeset.
Which characters are which
| Looks like | Name | Code | Becomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| “ | Left double quotation mark | U+201C | “ |
| ” | Right double quotation mark | U+201D | “ |
| ‘ | Left single quotation mark | U+2018 | ’ |
| ’ | Right single quotation mark, apostrophe | U+2019 | ’ |
| „ | Double low-9 quotation mark (German) | U+201E | “ |
| « » | Guillemets (French, Russian) | U+00AB, U+00BB | “ |
| ″ ′ | Double and single prime | U+2033, U+2032 | “ and ’ |
Where straight quotes matter
- Code and config files. Python, JavaScript, SQL, JSON and YAML all need straight quotes around strings. A curly quote is a syntax error.
- Terminal commands. A command copied from a blog or a doc with curly quotes fails in the shell, often with a confusing message.
- CSV and spreadsheets. CSV uses straight double quotes to wrap fields. Curly ones are treated as text and columns shift.
- Search and replace. A search for don’t won’t find don’t.
- Measurements. 6′2″ should use primes, but in plain-text fields people type 6’2”. Straightening makes them consistent.
Where curly quotes are right
In books, articles, slides and printed material, curly quotes are the typographic standard. If a draft was written in a plain-text editor and is going to print, the curly row does the conversion in one go. Proofread apostrophes at the start of words, such as ’tis or the ’90s, which should curl the same way as a closing quote.
Related clean-up
AI drafts and copied web text often bring em dashes and hidden characters along with curly quotes. The em dash remover gives you six replacements for —, and the invisible character remover shows and strips zero-width spaces.
Questions people ask
What are smart quotes?
Curly quotation marks, “like these” and ‘these’, that word processors swap in as you type. They look better in print, but they are different characters from the straight " and ' on your keyboard, so code, command lines, JSON and CSV files can’t read them as quotes.
Why does my code break when I paste from Word or Google Docs?
Those apps turn straight quotes into curly ones as you type. A programming language sees “ as an unknown character, not the start of a string, so you get a syntax error. Paste the snippet here, copy the straight-quotes or code-safe row, and the quotes work again.
How do I turn off smart quotes in Word?
On Windows, go to File > Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect Options > AutoFormat As You Type and untick “Straight quotes” with “smart quotes”. On a Mac, Word > Preferences > AutoCorrect has the same setting. In Google Docs, uncheck Tools > Preferences > Use smart quotes.
What does the code-safe ASCII row change?
Everything the straight-quotes row does, plus em and en dashes to hyphens, the ellipsis character to three dots, bullets to asterisks, and invisible or unusual spaces to normal spaces or nothing. The result is plain ASCII punctuation that every terminal, compiler and CSV parser understands.
Can it make quotes curly again?
Yes, the curly quotes row does the reverse. A quote after a space or at the start of a line opens, every other one closes, and an apostrophe inside a word becomes ’. Check quotes that start with an apostrophe, like ’90s, since those are easy to get backwards.