Smart Quotes & Dashes Converter

A typewriter has one double quote and one single quote; typography has opening and closing forms (“ ” and ‘ ’) and uses the closing single quote as the apostrophe. The page decides by position: a straight quote at the start of the text, after a space or after an opening bracket becomes an opening quote; anywhere else it closes. A single quote between two letters is an apostrophe (it’s), one after a word and before a space or punctuation is a closing quote or possessive (dogs’), and a leading one before a clipped word or decade (’90s, ’tis) is an apostrophe rather than an opening quote.

Three hyphens become an em dash (—). Two hyphens become an em dash by default — the common typewriter convention — or an en dash (–, for ranges like 10–20) if you choose; a single hyphen is never touched. Three dots become the ellipsis character (…). Text inside backticks is treated as code and left alone. The reverse direction maps every curly quote, guillemet, dash and ellipsis back to ASCII, which is what code, URLs and some databases need.

Position rules cannot always tell an opening single quote from an apostrophe before a word (’cause vs ‘cause’), and a plural possessive at the end of a quotation is ambiguous. The counts are shown, and an odd number of converted quotes triggers a warning so the text can be checked. Nothing leaves the browser; the same four anonymous usage counts as the rest of the site apply.