Skip to content
BoldlyType
All tools

Smart Quotes Converter

Turn straight quotes into proper curly ones, double hyphens into em dashes and three dots into an ellipsis, or strip all of it back to plain ASCII for code, CSV files and forms that choke on typographic characters.

How to use the smart quotes converter

  1. Paste your text and choose Smart for publishing or Straight for code and data.
  2. Untick anything you don’t want touched: quotes, dashes or ellipses.
  3. Copy the result.

The characters it changes

StraightSmartName
"text"“text”Double quotation marks (U+201C, U+201D)
'text'‘text’Single quotation marks (U+2018, U+2019)
don'tdon’tApostrophe = right single quote (U+2019)
--—Em dash (U+2014)
word - wordword – wordSpaced en dash (U+2013)
...…Horizontal ellipsis (U+2026)

Which should you use?

Use smart quotes anywhere people read: blog posts, newsletters, captions, CVs and slides. They’re what professional typesetting uses, and they make long text easier on the eye.

Use straight quotes anywhere a machine reads: code, JSON, CSV, spreadsheet formulas, terminal commands and HTML. Text drafted in Word, Google Docs or Apple Notes gets curly quotes automatically, which is the usual reason a pasted command or formula suddenly fails.

Need other clean-up? Find hidden characters left by copy-paste, or find and replace anything else.

Frequently asked questions

About the smart quotes & dash converter.

Straight quotes (" and ') are the same shape at both ends; they come from typewriters and keyboards. Smart, or curly, quotes have distinct opening and closing forms (“ ” and ‘ ’) and are what books and well-set websites use. The closing single quote ’ is also the correct apostrophe, as in don’t.

Anywhere text is read by a machine: code, JSON, CSV, spreadsheet formulas, command lines, HTML attributes and many form fields. Curly quotes break those, which is why text pasted from Word or Google Docs into a terminal or config file often fails. Switch the tool to Straight to clean it.

By position. A quote at the start of a line or after a space or opening bracket opens; one after a letter or punctuation closes. An apostrophe between letters (it's) always becomes ’, and a quote before a two-digit year ('90s) is treated as an apostrophe too. Check nested quotes and unusual cases by eye; no rule set gets every sentence right.

Two or three hyphens become an em dash (—), and a hyphen with a space on each side between words becomes a spaced en dash (–). Hyphens inside words, dates and phone numbers are left alone. In Straight mode, em dashes become -- and en dashes become -.

Explore the topic cluster

A wider set of tools and guides on this topic.

FormatterLinkedIn Text FormatterBold and italic for a plain-text editor.FormatterInstagram Text FormatterStyle captions, bios and comments.GuideHow to Format Text on LinkedInBold and italic in a plain-text editor, step by step.GuideMarkdown on WhatsApp, Discord & SlackWhich apps take native markdown vs need Unicode.FormatterWhatsApp Text FormatterBold, italic and strikethrough that stick.FormatterDiscord Text FormatterMarkdown plus Unicode for servers and DMs.