Question 1

What are smart (curly) quotes?

Accepted Answer

Smart quotes are typographic quotes that curve inward (“ ” ‘ ’) instead of being straight up-and-down (" '). Books, magazines and most professionally designed websites use curly quotes because they're easier to read and look more polished than straight ASCII quotes.

Question 2

Should I use em-dashes or en-dashes?

Accepted Answer

Use em-dashes (—) for breaks in thought (like this one) and en-dashes (–) for ranges like 2010–2020 or relationships like New York–Boston flights. Most style guides recommend em-dashes for parenthetical asides and en-dashes for numeric ranges.

Question 3

Will this tool break my code?

Accepted Answer

No. The tool only converts the characters you select (quotes, dashes, ellipsis). It leaves parentheses, brackets, braces, slashes and code syntax alone, so HTML strings, JSON keys and programming code remain intact.

Question 4

Can I convert curly quotes back to straight?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Switch the conversion direction in the toolbar to convert curly quotes back to straight ASCII quotes. This is useful when pasting text into programming environments or systems that don't support Unicode typography.