SmartyPants

2.0.2 · active · verified Thu Apr 16

SmartyPants is a Python library that converts plain ASCII punctuation in text to "smart" typographic HTML entities. It transforms straight quotes to "curly" quotes, backticks-style quotes, -- and --- to en- and em-dashes, and three consecutive dots to an ellipsis entity. The current version is 2.0.2, and it is actively maintained with recent fixes for Python 3.12+ compatibility.

Common errors

```
NameError: name 'smartypants' is not defined
```
cause The `smartypants` module was not imported before use.

fix Add `import smartypants` at the top of your Python file.
```
TypeError: smartypants() takes X positional arguments but Y were given (where X and Y are numbers, often 1 and 2)
```
cause You are likely attempting to pass a string or incorrect type as an attribute argument to `smartypants.smartypants()`, which was removed in version 2.0.0.

fix Use the `Attr` enum for specifying processing options. For example, `from smartypants import Attr; smartypants.smartypants(text, attrs=Attr.q | Attr.d)`.
```
UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte X in position Y: character maps to <undefined>
```
cause This error can occur when processing text with unexpected encodings, particularly when running on systems with default encodings that don't match the input text (e.g., Python 3 with specific locales handling Unicode characters).

fix Ensure your input text is consistently encoded, typically UTF-8. Explicitly decode input if reading from a file, for example, `text = open('input.txt', encoding='utf-8').read()`.

Warnings

breaking Version 2.0.0 introduced significant breaking changes, including dropping Pyblosxom support, removing string-type attributes in favor of `Attr` enums, and deprecating old function names like `smartyPants`, `educateQuotes`, and `processEscapes`.
Fix: Update your code to use `smartypants.Attr` for specifying processing options (e.g., `Attr.q | Attr.d`) instead of string arguments. Refer to the official documentation for the updated API.
gotcha SmartyPants processes most plain text, but it deliberately skips certain HTML elements (e.g., `<pre>`, `<code>`, `<span>`, `<script>`, `<style>`) by default to prevent unintended conversion of code or other literal content.
Fix: If smart punctuation appears unexpectedly in specific HTML tags, check if the tag is in the `tags_to_skip` list. You can modify `smartypants.tags_to_skip` or `smartypants._tags_to_skip_regex()` for advanced customization, but be aware of potential side effects.
gotcha To prevent 'smart' conversions for literal straight quotes, hyphens, or periods (e.g., '6\'2"' instead of '6\u20192\u201d'), use backslash escapes (`\`, `\-`, `\.`).
Fix: Prepend a backslash before any punctuation character that you wish to remain as a literal ASCII character. For example, `text = "It's 6\'2\" tall."`.

Install

pip install smartypants Install stable version

Imports

smartypants
```
import smartypants
```
Attr
```
from smartypants import Attr
```

Quickstart

Demonstrates basic usage of the smartypants function to convert ASCII punctuation to typographic entities, and how to use attributes to control conversions.

import smartypants

text = '"SmartyPants" is smart, so is <code>smartypants</code> -- a Python port...'
processed_text = smartypants.smartypants(text)
print(processed_text)

# Example with attributes
from smartypants import Attr
attrs = Attr.q | Attr.d # Enable quotes and dashes
processed_text_with_attrs = smartypants.smartypants(text, attrs)
print(processed_text_with_attrs)

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