This is a sim­ple Word­Press plu­gin that allows you to copy and paste from word-processing soft­ware that automag­i­cally does smart quotes con­ver­sion (curly quotes). You can do this with­out using this plu­gin — but the char­ac­ters aren’t proper HTML enti­ties and it’s dirty. CurlyEnc con­verts curly quote char­ac­ters to their proper HTML entity codes — some­thing Word­Press does per­fectly fine with nor­mal quo­ta­tion marks, but not with these ones.

Sim­ply upload CurlyEnc into your plugins direc­tory and enable it from the Plu­g­ins sec­tion of your Word­Press admin­is­tra­tion panel, and it should* work.

* No guar­an­tees, no promises. If your weblog sprouts furry ears and starts chas­ing your mouse, so to speak, I accept no respon­si­bil­ity. Yada yada. Happy to try and help. More seri­ously, I don’t know that much about char­ac­ter encod­ing, so I wouldn’t be entirely sur­prised if my mag­i­cal char­ac­ter is some­thing of a dud on some instal­la­tions. I know it’s a good con­cept, and this is my best imple­men­ta­tion of it — if any­one else has a bet­ter idea as to how it should be done, please share!

On a related note, it’s released under the GNU GPL — you can have that five lines of code for free! Sorry, no steak knives.

View the PHP source, or down­load a plain text ver­sion.

Tags: HTML, PHP, word-processing software, WordPress administration