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

It looks like your initial post covers most of the ideas I was going to write here, this is what I've got left...

For the apostrophe example ("I like 'That '70s show'", she said), it's unlikely that quotes will be nested directly inside quotes of the same type. You could take advantage of that.

Best way to do this in my opinion is to make the code only handle unambiguous cases (double quotes are pretty simple). For the ones with multiple possible choices, store their position in a list and examine it when it's finished. You might find a few more easily-coded cases in there, or you might just decide to fix them manually.