Replacing Straight Quotes with Typographic Quotes Safely

Automatically replacing straight quotes with typographic quotes sounds simple, but the danger is obvious: if you do it blindly, you can break templates, code fragments, URLs, JSON, and snippet calls.

The important rule

Do not run quote replacement across raw template source or mixed technical markup without context. Smart typography should be applied only to human-readable text fields or to already-rendered content where code blocks and URLs are excluded.

Safe places for typographic replacement

• article body text after content is finalized
• editorial fields that contain prose only
• post-processing filters that skip tags, URLs, and code blocks

Unsafe places

• snippet calls such as
• HTML attributes
• JavaScript strings
• JSON data
• template and chunk source in the manager

Recommended approach

If you want typographic quotes on the public site, apply the transformation in the presentation layer and only to clean text nodes. Do not rewrite the stored source unless you are certain the field holds prose only.

Good typography is useful, but it should never be allowed to damage executable or structured content.