Trying to change single quotes to double quotes.

[MuppetGate]

Hi there.

I have a whole project full of Scrivener documents that I need to run
through a simple(ish) conversion. I want to change the single quotes
into double quotes.

Best I could come up with was a two stage process:

Convert the single quotes to doubles (which will also convert the
apostrophes in !'m and didn't etc.)

Next run a regex over it:
Find ([^ \n)"([^ \n])
Replace with \1'\2

The problem is that the replace for the apostrophes isn't working.
Rather than doing the group replacement, it's just replacing the
everything with \1'\2. I thought substitution was supported, so I'm
not sure what I'm doing wrong.

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.

[Mark Munz]

First, substitution is supported, but the replacement syntax in ICU is
$1 $2, not \1 \2 -- see Help > Regex Reference in TextSoap menu for
more complete details of the ICU syntax.

Second, you could do something like

Find: (\w)(')(\w)
Replace: $1’$3 { that's a curly apostrophe }

Find: '
Replace: "

Find: ’ { that's a curly apostrophe }
Replace: '

Effectively replacing any single quote surrounded by word letters on
both sides to a curly apostrophe, covert your single quotes to double
quotes, finally find the curly apostrophe and convert it back to a
straight apostrophe.

This does make the assumption that you would not embedded quotes
within a word. That would be considered the most common situation as
most people would not'quote'text like this. But this will fail if you
use things like 'cause hangin' etc. Because these are really
exceptions, it's easier to special case them. Use the bulk find and
replace action to find those words after the conversion in their new
form: "cause hangin" or replace them beforehand with the standard
words.

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Mark Munz
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[Iridescent Words]

Hi Mark,

Does this find and replace work on Scrivener or Google docs? Is there a find replace button on Scrivener you can use instead of coding? I need to change all the quotes in my manuscript from double to single, and the online converters don't work. Any help would be appreciated. 

Regards,

Malina