Removing Smart Quotes from WordPress Posts

Sample code for removing smart quotes, or curly quotes, from WordPress posts when it automatically converts normal quotes to smart quotes.

This snippet will remove all smart quotes and curly quotes and replace them with standard straight quotes, and prevent WordPress from adding more smart quotes.

WordPress has a nice feature that converts the standard quotes ( " ) to pretty "curly quotes" or "smart quotes" as they are called. This is all well and good on a textual blog, but when it comes to programming code, it can be a real pain in the proverbials.

This little snippet will remove all smart curly quotes and replace them with standard straight quotes. The code needs to be placed within your theme's functions.php.

add_filter('the_excerpt', 'removesmartquotes');
add_filter('the_content', 'removesmartquotes');

function removesmartquotes($content)
{
  $content = str_replace("“", """, $content);  
  $content = str_replace("”", """, $content);  
  $content = str_replace("’", "'", $content);  
  $content = str_replace("‘", "'", $content);  

  return $content;
}

All this is doing is creating a new filter for the_content and the_excerpt that does a simple string replacement, from curly to straight.

There are other methods, one of which is to use:

remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');

However, this will remove all formatting, including ampersands and so on. I had great trouble with XML after this one, which is why I wrote my own.