Converting MS word "curly" quotes and apostrophes

Question

How do I convert the MS Word quotes and apostrophes to regular quotes and apostrophes characters in Java? What's the unicode number for these characters?

“how are you doing?”

‘howdy’

Since Stack Overflow autofixes them, here's how they appear in an editor

to

"how are you doing?"

'howdy'

Not converted here, the ‘smart quotes’ are fine. StackOverflow converts straight quotes to “” in question titles (controversially), but leaves question text alone. — bobince, May 13 '10 at 11:30
Incidentally, is there really a good reason to replace them with straight quotes? They're not special “MS Word” characters, they're perfectly valid Unicode characters which should normally by handled fine by any application that can handle Unicode. — bobince, May 13 '10 at 11:31
@bobince not all applications handle unicode properly, but often people paste text that they wrote in ms-word and it's nice to be able to preserve the quotes (by converting them to regular quotes) than to strip them out completely. — dan, Jul 21 '10 at 15:13

dimo414 · Answer 1 · 2015-10-02T22:47:25.280

21

Going off Thomas's answer, the code is:

return text.replaceAll("[\\u2018\\u2019]", "'")
           .replaceAll("[\\u201C\\u201D]", "\"");

edited Oct 02 '15 at 22:47

answered Sep 28 '11 at 19:26

dimo414

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score 13 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 11 '19 at 21:35

13

Here's a very useful link for everyone dealing with Unicode: Unicode codepoint lookup/search tool.

Searching for "quotation mark" gives

‘ (U+2018) LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
’ (U+2019) RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
“ (U+201C) LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
” (U+201D) RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK

There are several other quote-like symbols that you might consider replacing.

edited Feb 11 '19 at 21:35

Machavity

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answered May 13 '10 at 11:03

Thomas

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The Unicode lookup link given in the answer is a third-party site. A better, "official" link is at unicode.org: https://util.unicode.org/UnicodeJsps/properties.html – Andrew P. Apr 25 '23 at 00:17

score 11 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

Thank to Nick van Esch at C# How to replace Microsoft's Smart Quotes with straight quotation marks?

Here is the code ('\u2019' is ’ in MS Word), it's useful because it covers problematic word characters.

if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2013') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u2013', '-');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2014') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u2014', '-');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2015') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u2015', '-');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2017') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u2017', '_');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2018') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u2018', '\'');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2019') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u2019', '\'');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u201a') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u201a', ',');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u201b') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u201b', '\'');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u201c') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u201c', '\"');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u201d') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u201d', '\"');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u201e') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u201e', '\"');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2026') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace("\u2026", "...");
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2032') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u2032', '\'');
if (buffer.IndexOf('\u2033') > -1) buffer = buffer.Replace('\u2033', '\"');

In the above answer, we are mentioning all MS Word quotes. Is there not any simple code which replaces all MS Word Quotes with Straight quotation marks? I mean, how can we list all the MS Word quotes? — Anish Mittal, Jul 28 '17 at 06:31

Converting MS word "curly" quotes and apostrophes

3 Answers3

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