Straight quotes to curly quotes and back, with smart apostrophes, en and em dashes, and ellipsis, all in your browser
- Runs locally
- Category Text
- Best for Removing repetitive cleanup work from everyday writing and operations.
What this tool does
A free smart quotes converter that turns straight typewriter quotes into proper typographic curly quotes and back again. It reads context the way a typesetter does: a quote at the start of a word becomes an opening curly quote, a quote after a letter or punctuation becomes a closing one, and the apostrophe in words like it is or don't is rendered with the right single quotation mark, the same glyph publishers use. Flip the direction to strip curly quotes back to plain straight ASCII when you need clean source for code, CSV files or a database. Optional smart punctuation rewrites a double hyphen as an en dash, a triple hyphen as an em dash, and three dots as a single ellipsis character. Everything runs locally with one click copy and a shareable URL. Nothing you paste ever leaves the page.
Tool details
- Input
- Text
- The page exposes text boxes, numeric controls, file pickers, or structured inputs depending on the tool.
- Output
- Live result + Copy
- The result area focuses on usable output, with copy, download, or preview actions when supported.
- Privacy
- Browser-side processing
- The main tool logic does not call an external API, so inputs normally stay in the current tab.
- Save / share
- Shareable URL state
- Key settings are encoded in the URL so another person can reopen the same setup.
- Performance budget
- Initial JS <= 9 KB
- No WASM budget is declared, keeping the tool quick to open on mobile.
- Best fit
- Text · Content Creator
- Category and role tags drive related tools, internal links, and quick fit checks.
How to use
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1. Input
Paste or drop your content into the tool panel.
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2. Process
Click the button. All processing is local in your browser.
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3. Copy / Download
Copy the result or download to disk in one click.
How Smart Quotes Converter fits into your work
Use it to clean, compare, reshape, or extract plain text before it goes into a document, CMS, spreadsheet, or prompt.
Text jobs
- Removing repetitive cleanup work from everyday writing and operations.
- Making text easier to compare, paste, publish, or feed into another tool.
- Working with content locally when the text is private or unfinished.
Text checks
- Scan for unintended whitespace, duplicate lines, and lost punctuation.
- For long text, test the first few lines before applying the whole change.
- Copy the final output only after checking the preview.
Good next steps
These links move the current task into a more complete workflow.
- 1 Text Diff Compare two blocks of text — line-by-line additions, deletions, equal — colour highlighted, browser-only Open
- 2 Word Counter Count words, characters, sentences, paragraphs and reading time in any text — instant, browser-only Open
- 3 Find and Replace Text Batch find-and-replace on big text — regex, $1 capture groups, whole-word, case toggle, multiple chained rules — runs entirely in your browser Open
Real-world use cases
Polish a manuscript or article before publishing
You wrote a long piece in a plain editor where every quote is straight. Paste the whole thing here, convert to curly quotes, and the apostrophes and quotation marks come out the way a typesetter would set them, with opening and closing pairs matched and contractions using the right single quote. Copy it back into your CMS and the prose reads like a finished book rather than raw typewriter text.
Clean quotes out of text bound for code or a database
Someone pasted copy from a word processor and it is full of curly quotes that break your SQL string, your JSON config or a CSV import. Switch the direction to curly to straight, run the text through, and every smart quote and smart apostrophe collapses back to plain ASCII so the value parses and matches cleanly.
Fix one quote style across a mixed document
A document collected text from several sources, so some quotes are curly and some are straight, and it looks inconsistent. Run it through in either direction to make every quotation mark match a single style, then paste the uniform result back. No more hunting line by line for the one stray straight quote in a curly paragraph.
Add proper dashes and ellipses to social or marketing copy
Headlines and captions read sharper with a real em dash for an aside, an en dash for a range, and a single ellipsis instead of three loose dots. Turn on smart punctuation, type a double or triple hyphen and three dots as you write, and the tool swaps in the correct typographic glyphs before you publish.
Common pitfalls
Using the left single curly quote for an apostrophe. The apostrophe in it’s, don’t and ’90s is always the right single quotation mark, the closing glyph, never the opening one. Word processors get this wrong at the start of a word, which is exactly the case this tool handles correctly.
Pasting curly quotes into code. A smart quote inside a JSON value, a SQL string or a shell command is a different Unicode character than the ASCII quote the parser expects, so it throws a syntax error. Always convert curly back to straight before the text touches code.
Running double-hyphen smart punctuation over a code snippet. In code a double hyphen can be a CLI flag like --verbose or an SQL comment, and turning it into an en dash silently breaks it. Leave smart punctuation off, or use the reverse direction, when the text is source rather than prose.
Privacy
The whole conversion, reading each quote in context, choosing opening or closing, swapping in dashes and the ellipsis, is plain JavaScript that runs inside your browser tab. The text you paste is never uploaded and never logged. The one caveat is the shareable URL: it encodes your input in the query string, so a share link pasted into chat will record that text in the recipient server's access log. For anything confidential, use the copy button and paste the result rather than sharing the link.
FAQ
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