Which characters are replaced?

Curly double quotes (“ ”), curly single quotes (‘ ’), en dashes (–), em dashes (—), ellipsis (…), and non-breaking spaces are all mapped to ASCII equivalents.

Does it touch apostrophes inside words?

Yes. Curly apostrophes in words like "don't" or "it's" are converted to straight apostrophes, which is normally what you want for code or JSON.

No. The replacements happen entirely in your browser; nothing is transmitted.

curly ↔ straight · en/em dashes · ellipsis

Normalize smart quotes & punctuation

Convert curly quotes to straight (or vice versa). Also handles en/em dashes, ellipsis, and primes — common typographic typing pitfalls.

Smart Quotes Workspace

Input size

73 B

original

Output size

73 B

normalized

Direction

curly → straight

transform

Diff

bytes

input · text

output · normalized

"Hello," she said. "What's the time?" -- he asked. It's 10-12... 'maybe'.

Quick Start

How to normalize quotes

Word processors auto-replace straight quotes with curly ones. Paste them into code and they break syntax. This tool round-trips between the two.

01
Paste text
Copied from Word, Google Docs, or any rich text source.
Tokenisation is Unicode-aware via \p{L}\p{N} property classes — so accented letters, ideographs, and emoji code points all count correctly.
rich textUTF-8Unicodecode pointslive
input · textcurly · UTF-8
```
“Hello” said it
```
loaded · UTF-8UTF-8 · ready
02
Pick direction
Curly → Straight (for code/JSON). Straight → Curly (for prose).
Live re-counts run on every keystroke through a memoised reducer, so even multi-megabyte inputs stay smooth in the editor.
directionlivememoisedoptionssnappy
mode · options→ straight · live
```
"Hello" said it
```
options applied · livelive
03
Includes dashes & ellipsis
en-dash (–), em-dash (—), and Unicode ellipsis (…) also normalized.
enem…
extraspunctuation
```
-- → —    ... → …
```
valid
04
Copy or download
One click.
Copy writes via the Async Clipboard API; downloads ship as text/plain; charset=utf-8 — nothing leaves your tab.
copyclipboardtext/plainblobclient-side
export · copiedready · done
```
✓ Copied
```
shipped · ready to shipsuccess

Pro tips

Text-processing fundamentals worth knowing

Tokenise with Unicode classes

Use \p{L}\p{N} with the u flag so accents, ideographs, and emoji count properly.

Normalise line endings

Convert \r\n to \n before diffing or hashing — Windows-vs-Unix endings produce phantom changes.

Mind invisible characters

Zero-width joiners, BOMs, and non-breaking spaces look identical to ASCII space. Strip them before comparison or storage.

Stream don’t slurp

For multi-megabyte text, iterate line-by-line rather than loading everything to memory — keeps the tab responsive.

Choose collation deliberately

Default JS sort is code-point order, not human alphabetical. Use Intl.Collator for locale-aware sorting.

Re-run after normalisation

NFC vs NFD changes byte length but not visible glyphs. String.prototype.normalize() before counts and comparisons.

Use Cases

When to normalize quotes

Anywhere typographic punctuation breaks tooling.

Code from Word

Convert pasted code back to ASCII before compiling. Tokenisation uses Unicode property classes (\p{L}, \p{N}) with the u flag so accents, ideographs, and emoji code points all count correctly. Surrogate-pair-aware counts mean 🚀 weighs 1, not 2.

Unicode-correct

JSON cleanup

Smart quotes break JSON.parse. Convert before validating. Result updates as you type — paste and watch totals settle in milliseconds even on multi-megabyte inputs. Heavy work runs through a memoised reducer so the editor never janks.

diff-clean

CMS publishing

Add curly quotes when publishing prose to look more typographic. Output normalises line endings to LF for clean diffs across platforms. Windows-vs-Unix CRLF mismatches disappear, which keeps git blame honest and review comments focused on real changes.

instant counts

Markdown body

Decide whether your MD output uses straight or curly. Code-point counts are stable across NFC/NFD normalisation. Pair with the Reading Time Calculator to layer scan-time on top of raw counts, useful for editorial budgets and SEO meta-description limits.

platform-aware

Email templates

Strip curly quotes before storing as a template literal. All processing runs client-side — paste sensitive or pre-publish copy without it leaving the tab. The clipboard API writes UTF-8 text/plain so it survives transit to any editor or CMS.

code-point-accurate

Print typography

Add curly quotes & em-dashes for print-quality output. Same input plus same options always produces identical output, so the tool is safe to embed in CI scripts or doc-generation pipelines without race conditions.

lossless

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What gets converted?

Quotes (', ', ", ‟), dashes (–, —), ellipsis (…), prime marks (′, ″), and the non-breaking space.

Is curly direction perfect?

Heuristic. Opening vs closing is detected by surrounding context. Pre-existing curly quotes are preserved.

What about apostrophes in contractions?

Converted to ’ (closing single curly) since they're between letters.

Is anything sent to a server?

No. All processing runs locally.

What other tools handle entities?

For HTML entities, see HTML Entities in the Encoding category.

Suggest a tool

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