Removing Smart Quotes from WordPress Posts

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 replace, 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.