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.

Answer 2

In case you have a string like test "abc" test "abc", you can check for each " whether it should be an opening or closing one by looking at how many " are preceeding it:

If it's an even amount it should be “, otherwise ”.

var str = 'test "abc" test "abc"';
var splitted = str.split('"');
var result = '';
for(var i = 0; i < splitted.length; i++) {
    result += splitted[i] + ( i % 2 == 0 ? '&ldqou;' : '&rdquo;' );
}
result = result.substring(0, result.length - 7); // remove last appended &ldquo;