Replace quote characters with better ones

Question

I have a webpage where I want to replace all standard quote characters \" with the nicer looking quotes. For example, we have

\"hello world\"<

Answer 1

I might be missing something obvious here, but I think the following RegEx solution would work -

subject = 'test "abc" test "abc"';
result = subject.replace(/"([A-Za-z ]*)"/ig, "“$1”");
alert(result);

If you were using PHP then you could write some similar code in PHP - (my PHP skills are somewhat lacking though! The code below was generated with RegEx Buddy so it hasn't been tested and may need changing)

$subject = 'test "abc" test "abc"';    
$result = preg_replace('/"([A-Za-z ]*)"/i', '“$1”', $subject);

Alternatively, you could load the content into a DIV using PHP then use JavaScript to change the DIV contents, here's a bit of JQuery that would do the job -

$("#contentdiv").text($("#contentdiv").text().replace(/"([A-Za-z ]*)"/ig, "“$1”"));

There's a jsfiddle that demonstrates the above JQuery here.