What are smart quotes?
Smart quotes — also called curly quotes or typographer's quotes — are the curved
quotation marks and apostrophes that word processors substitute for the plain straight
marks on your keyboard. Type a straight apostrophe ' or a straight double
quote " in Word, Google Docs, or most modern editors, and an autocorrect
feature quietly swaps it for a curly equivalent: an opening mark that leans one way and a
closing one that leans the other, styled to look like professional typesetting. It's a
deliberate design choice meant to make printed and on-screen text look more polished, and
most people never notice it happening.
The catch is that "curly" isn't just a font style — it's a different character. A straight apostrophe is Unicode code point U+0027. A curly closing single quote is U+2019, a curly opening single quote is U+2018, and related marks (U+201A, U+201B, U+2032) show up depending on the app. Curly double quotes have their own family: U+201C, U+201D, U+201E, U+201F, and U+2033. A couple of these are easy for a human eye to mix up; to a computer parsing your text, each one is a distinct symbol. A smart quotes remover exists specifically to convert every character in both families back to the plain U+0027 and U+0022 your keyboard produces, so what looks right also behaves right.
Why smart quotes break code and data files
Every programming language, data format, and command-line shell that uses quotation marks to delimit a value was written expecting exactly one apostrophe character and one double-quote character — the straight ASCII ones. A JSON file with a curly quote in place of a straight one won't parse: the parser hits a character it doesn't recognize as a string delimiter and throws a syntax or "invalid character" error, even though the file looks perfectly normal to your eyes. A CSV opened in a spreadsheet can misalign columns if a curly quote sneaks into a quoted field. A shell command with a curly apostrophe in it fails outright, because bash and every other shell only treat the straight apostrophe as a quoting character.
This is almost always an accident of copy-paste. You write a snippet in Word or Google Docs, where smart quotes are on by default, then paste it into a code editor, a config file, or a terminal — and the curly characters come along invisibly until something breaks. The fix isn't to retype everything by hand and replace curly apostrophe and quote characters one at a time; it's to run the text through a converter that turns curly quotes to straight quotes automatically, in one pass, before you paste it somewhere that cares about the difference.
How to use this converter
Paste your text into the box on the left. The box on the right updates instantly, with every curly single and double quote swapped for its straight equivalent — no button to press, no page reload. This is a one-way, one-purpose tool: it doesn't reformat, reword, or touch anything else in your text, so straight quotes, other punctuation, and everything else stay exactly as you typed them. Click Copy to grab the converted text, or Clear to start over with a new paste. Because the whole thing runs locally in your browser, you can safely convert smart quotes in a code snippet, a config file, or a client's document text without any of it leaving your machine or being logged anywhere.
How to turn off smart quotes in Word, Google Docs, and macOS
Converting text after the fact works, but if you write a lot of code or JSON inside a word processor, it's worth turning smart quotes off at the source.
In Microsoft Word, the setting lives under File → Options → Proofing → AutoCorrect Options, on the AutoFormat As You Type tab. In the Replace section, uncheck the box for straight quotes with smart quotes — new quotes you type will stay straight from then on.
In Google Docs, open Tools → Preferences and look for a "Use smart quotes" checkbox. Turning it off stops Docs from auto-converting straight quotes and apostrophes as you type, though it won't retroactively fix quotes already in an existing document.
On macOS, the substitution is system-wide: look in your Mac's Keyboard settings (System Settings, or System Preferences on older macOS) for a text-input or text-replacement section with a smart-quotes option. Turning it off stops the OS-level substitution used by Mail, Notes, Messages, TextEdit, and other apps sharing Apple's system text-input handling — though a few apps, such as Pages, keep their own separate toggle.
Whichever apps you use, this converter is still the fastest fix for text you already have, or text that arrived from someone else's document with smart quotes baked in.