Quoter Home Page

This is the home page for quoter, a simple tool (filter) that takes HTML, XML, or SGML files as input and sends them back out as output with their quotation marks fixed. It's designed for Unix-like systems (including GNU/Linux); it may run on Windows, but that is untested (and you'll need many tools, such as flex and a C compiler, that come standard with Unix-like systems but take more work to install on Windows systems). It is extremely fast, and is smart enough to handle correctly lots of special cases without help.

It handles Microsoft's non-standard quotes, typical Unix conventions (`` and ''), and straight single and double quotes. It knows to leave untouched anything in comments and scripts, as well as anything surrounded by <tt>...</tt> and <pre>...</pre>.

You can freely use, modify, and redistribute it under the terms of the GPL version 2 or later. It's a standard source distribution (more technically, an autoconfiscated tarball), so you can install it normally.

If you repeatedly reuse quoter (instead of using it as a one-time repair system), edit HTML/XML/SGML files using a tool that doesn't insert curling quotes, and sometimes need both straight quotes and curling quotes in the main body — well, you have an incredibly rare requirement. You can still do that while using quoter; just use the character encodings of the straight quote marks (&#34; and &#39;). Probably the only people who will need to do this are people who write about character encodings, like me; normal people can gleefully ignore this suggestion.

Download quoter now! (tarball format)

Feel free to see my home page.