These are smart quotes: “ ” ‘ ’
The easiest way to get Emacs to automatically insert smart-quotes is to use smart-quotes mode.
I prefer not to use smart-quotes mode, however. I find it easier when editing to stick to plain quotes (” and ‘) and then to let org-mode export convert to smart quotes.
What makes things awkward is finding text with smart-quotes already included. I wrote the following function to strip those smart-quotes out. It narrows to a region, uses save-restriction to remember how things were before the narrowing and then uses two regex searches to find first double quotes and then single quotes, replacing both with plain quotes.
1: (defun strip-smart-quotes (rStart rEnd) 2: "Replace smart quotes with plain quotes in text" 3: (interactive "r") 4: (save-restriction 5: (narrow-to-region rStart rEnd) 6: (goto-char (point-min)) 7: (while (re-search-forward "[“”]" nil t) (replace-match "\"" nil t)) 8: (goto-char (point-min)) 9: (while (re-search-forward "[‘’]" nil t) (replace-match "'" nil t)) 10: ))
Before: “You put your smart-quotes in, you take your smart-quotes out… ”
After: "You put your smart-quotes in, you take your smart-quotes out… "