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    <p><code>”</code> and <code>’</code> are not junk characters. They are perfectly good Unicode characters (U+201C LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK and U+2018 LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK). Modern applications should be capable of dealing with all Unicode characters; if you can't handle the smart quotes you probably also can't handle accents, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese or any of the other characters users are likely to want to use. You should concentrate on ensuring that your application supports Unicode, rather than trying to fix this one visible symptom.</p> <p>Pasting <code>'</code> and <code>"</code> (ASCII straight quote) characters into a text box should not turn them into non-ASCII ‘smart’ quotes. Where they typically tend to come from is Microsoft Word's misguided ‘AutoReplace’ feature, which replaces straight quotes with smart quotes as you type. This is an annoyance, but ultimately it's limited to Office and there's not really much you can do about it. Whilst you <em>can</em> manually replace <code>“</code> and <code>”</code> with <code>"</code> by doing a trivial string replacement (and how you do that depends on what language/environment you are talking about), you'll also be removing correct usage of those characters, and you won't be fixing all the other sad broken auto-replacements that MS Office does.</p> <p>The <code>…</code> single-character ellipsis is a slightly different case, and arguably ‘junk’: to Unicode, U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS is a ‘compatibility character’ which is only intended to round-trip nicely to existing encodings that include it as a separate characters. Normally three dot characters should be used instead. You can replace compatibility characters by using Unicode normalisation, in particular Normal Form KC. Again, how you access normalisation is something that depends on your programming language/environment. For example in Python, <code>unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', u'…')</code> gives you <code>u'...'</code>.</p>
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