Smart Quotes → Straight Quotes Converter
Word, Google Docs and AI chat tools automatically turn straight quotes into curly “smart” quotes. Great for typography — terrible for code, JSON, CSV and half the forms on the internet. Fix them all in one paste.
🔒 Runs 100% in your browser — your text never leaves this page.
Why smart quotes break things
To a human eye, "hello" and “hello” look nearly identical. To a computer they are entirely different characters: U+0022 versus U+201C/U+201D. Paste a curly-quoted snippet into a config file, a JSON payload, a SQL query, a CSV import or a command line, and you get syntax errors, failed parses, or — worse — code that silently does the wrong thing. The same applies to apostrophes: it's with a curly U+2019 fails string comparisons that expect U+0027.
What this converter does
It normalizes the whole family in one pass: left/right double quotes (“ ” „ ‟), left/right single quotes (‘ ’ ‚ ‛), guillemets (« » ‹ ›), primes (′ ″) and lookalike apostrophe characters — all converted to plain straight " and '. The ellipsis character (…) becomes three dots, and with the other toggles enabled you also clean the em dashes, invisible characters and non-standard spaces that usually travel together with smart quotes in copied text.
Who needs this
Developers pasting snippets from blogs or ChatGPT; writers moving drafts from Word into a CMS or Markdown editor; anyone whose YAML/JSON/env file mysteriously stopped parsing after an edit in a word processor; data folks cleaning CSVs exported from office tools. If a parser is complaining about a quote that looks perfectly fine — it is one of these.
FAQ
Can I convert only the quotes and leave everything else alone?
Yes — uncheck the other categories above and keep only "Smart quotes & punctuation" enabled. Set the em dash dropdown to "keep it" if you want dashes untouched.
Does it convert straight quotes back to curly?
No, this tool goes one direction: typographic → plain. That is the direction that fixes code and data. Word processors already handle the reverse automatically.
Will it change quotes inside non-English text?
It converts guillemets (« ») used in French and other languages to straight quotes when the category is enabled. If you are cleaning prose that should keep them, disable the quotes category for that paste.
Is the text uploaded anywhere?
No — conversion happens locally in your browser and works offline.