How to clean smart quotes
To clean smart quotes, paste text copied from Word, Google Docs, or a web page, and the tool rewrites the typographic punctuation as plain ASCII in your browser. Curly quotes become straight quotes, fancy dashes become hyphens, and the single ellipsis glyph becomes three periods.
This matters because smart punctuation often breaks code, JSON, CSV imports, and command-line input where only straight quotes and plain hyphens are valid. Cleaning the text first prevents subtle syntax errors that are hard to spot.
- Paste text with curly quotes or fancy dashes
- Curly quotes become straight quotes
- En/em dashes become hyphens
- The ellipsis glyph becomes three dots
- Copy the plain-text result
Smart Quotes Cleaner vs. Unicode Cleaner
Smart Quotes Cleaner handles visible typographic punctuation that you can see and read, such as curly quotes, dashes, and ellipses. It is the right tool when copy looks fine but breaks in a code editor or import.
Unicode Cleaner, by contrast, targets invisible trouble characters like zero-width spaces and normalization issues you cannot see. Use this tool for punctuation cleanup and Unicode Cleaner when text behaves oddly for no visible reason.