Introduction

You want your HTML to be typographically correct (notes here). But typing ‘this’ constantly to get ‘this’ instead of "this" is ludicrous. Perl to the rescue.

Which looks so in your browser…

G4:jinx[786]/www/perl>quote-fixer plain-quote.html

Which will now render in a browser…

Discussion

This is a great utility but it a simplistic one. Still, an algorithm that works for 99% of given cases is a good one. This one will fail in certain places because it’s not looking for delimited quotes. Therefore it is not smart enough to know what to do with open contractions like ‘cause and ‘Burque and it picks the wrong quote. It also fails when we want the original symbols, as in, “I am 6'2" and change.”

You can see in the code that we need to keep track of what tags we’ve descended into. If we fix quotes within an HTML tag, we’ll break it. Fixing them in a style declaration will break the CSS. If we fix quotes in comments, we’ll break SSIs. If we fix quotes in scripts, we’ll break them. If we fix quotes in pre, code, or textarea tags, we’ll change the literal meaning of demonstrated code. So we skip the attributes of tags altogether and avoid messing with the content of pre|code|script|textarea|style tags.

A fully robust solution might make use of recursive regexes or Text::Balanced but it would be “breakable” by bad user input (incorrect punctuation) and the one above is much simpler and works quite well as is.