How to replace special characters (curly quotes, dashes, ellipses) in OS X?

Question

Pretty simple: I need a way to convert special characters like curly quotes, ellipses, etc to their "plain text" version, i.e. … to ..., “ to ".

This is on OS X, meaning I can't use a macro in Microsoft Word to do this as I have on a PC.

This is for a plain-text email, not HTML, which is why I need them in this format.

Answer 1

I see you want to do this in Mail. The best way to do this (imho) is with a Service Menu item. Word Service has an option to straighten/curly quotes.

If you're using Snow Leopard, it's pretty straightforward to create your own service menu item with a python/ruby/applescript to replace arbitrary special characters.

EDIT: Yeah I glossed over how to do this by saying it's "pretty straightforward" a bit disingenuously. Here's how to do it with a ruby script. ;-)

1. Open Automator
2. Create new Workflow, choose "Service" as your template
3. Choose Service receives selected text in any application with the top popups
4. Click the checkbox underneath: Replaces selected text
5. Drag Run Shell Script from the left pane into your workflow
6. With the Shell pupup select /usr/bin/ruby/
7. Copy and paste in the following code, modify to your needs

8. Save! Find it in the Services menu of your favourite application

   $KCODE = 'u'
   require 'jcode'
   # need the above two lines for ruby <1.9.1 
   # to make str.tr and str.gsub unicode aware
   
   # grab the selected text!
   theText = STDIN.gets(nil)
   
   # str.tr replaces single characters
   theText = theText.tr('“”','"')
   theText = theText.tr("‘’","'")
   
   # need to use str.gsub: replacement is > replaced characters
   theText = theText.gsub("…","...")
   theText = theText.gsub("—","--")
   
   # add more replacements as desired . . .
   
   STDOUT << theText  # replace da text!
   

Answer 2

The easy point-and-click way -- Bare Bones Software has a free text editor called "TextWrangler" that has a built-in "Convert to ASCII" command. You can even automate it: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=890344

The application also has regular expression search and replace, if you need it.

Answer 3

http://www.mbayer.de/html2text/

might be what you want.

For OS X, there's a macports port for it, if you have macports, use

sudo port install html2text

Answer 4

I've done this with an Automator workflow that:

1. Uses the "Get Selected Content from Word Documents" action and passes that output to...
2. "Run Shell Script" to use sed -e 's/“/"/g; s/”/"/g; s/…/.../g; ' -e "s/’/'/g" and passes that output to...
3. "Copy to Clipboard" action

Save this script under ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Word Script Menu Items/ and it will appear in Word's script menu.

Just select the text you want to send, run the script, and then you can paste the cleaned text into an email.