Technology

NOTE: You will be editing your blog files directly, so if you are not comfortable with this, you may want to search for a plugin instead. If you move forward REMEMBER to backup the file before you edit it.

How do you get your blog to stop replacing your regular quotes (the HTML entity ") with fancy/curly quotes? Here’s what worked for me, with links below to 2 other posts where I started me out.

First, according to Otto42 in the WordPress community when you are writing posts the fancy/curly quotes are applied through a filter called “the_content”. So go to wp-includes/default-filters.php and make a backup before editing it! If you upload an older version of this file you may end up with a 500 Internal Server Error and have to call GoDaddy to fix it while your wife looks at you like you are from another planet.

Below is the code you want to change and what to replace it with…

REPLACE
add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘wptexturize’);

WITH THIS
remove_filter(‘the_content’, ‘wptexturize’);

Upload your edited wp-includes/default-filters.php and you should not have any more fancy/curly quotes. There are plugins to do this, but I like to minimize using them and I am comfortable making edits like this.

While I was editing I decided it would be pretty useful if people adding code in comments could do the same so here’s another change to make that happen:

REPLACE
add_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘wptexturize’);

WITH THIS
remove_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘wptexturize’);

MORE
Wordpress – What does wptexturize do?

RESOURCES

Blogmum – Turn off curly quotes in WordPress
Wordpress – Turn off smart quotes