Ideas for converting straight quotes to curly quotes

Question

I have a file that contains \"straight\" (normal, ASCII) quotes, and I\'m trying to convert them to real quotation mark glyphs (“curly” quotes, U+2018 to U+201D). Since the tran

Answer 1

A good place to start would be with a state machine:

• Starting at position 0, iterate over the characters
• Upon finding a quote, enter the "Quoted" state ( open quote )
• If in "Quoted" state and you encounter a quote, return to "Starting" state ( closing quote )

You can make additional decisions at each of the state transitions.

You could attempt to normalize the single quotes by identifying known conjunctions, for instance, and converting them to a different, not text, character prior to processing.

My $0.02