Find and Replace in a Region: Strip Smart Quotes in a Region

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… "