SmartyPants

Summary

The SmartyPants extension converts ASCII dashes, quotes and ellipses to their HTML entity equivalents.

ASCII symbol Replacements HTML Entities Substitution Keys
' ‘ ’ ‘ ’ 'left-single-quote', 'right-single-quote'
" “ ” “ ” 'left-double-quote', 'right-double-quote'
<< >> « » &laquo; &raquo; 'left-angle-quote', 'right-angle-quote'
... … &hellip; 'ellipsis'
-- – &ndash; 'ndash'
--- — &mdash; 'mdash'

Using the configuration option ‘substitutions’ you can overwrite the default substitutions. Just pass a dict mapping (a subset of) the keys to the substitution strings.

For example, one might use the following configuration to get correct quotes for the German language:

extension_configs = {
    'smarty': {
        'substitutions': {
            'left-single-quote': '&sbquo;', # sb is not a typo!
            'right-single-quote': '&lsquo;',
            'left-double-quote': '&bdquo;',
            'right-double-quote': '&ldquo;'
        }
    }
}

Note

This extension re-implements the Python SmartyPants library by integrating it into the markdown parser. While this does not provide any additional features, it does offer a few advantages. Notably, it will not try to work on highlighted code blocks (using the CodeHilite Extension) like the third party library has been known to do.

Usage

See Extensions for general extension usage. Use smarty as the name of the extension.

See the Library Reference for information about configuring extensions.

The following options are provided to configure the output:

Option Default value Description
smart_dashes True whether to convert dashes
smart_quotes True whether to convert straight quotes
smart_angled_quotes False whether to convert angled quotes
smart_ellipses True whether to convert ellipses
substitutions {} overwrite default substitutions

A trivial example:

markdown.markdown(some_text, extensions=['smarty'])

Further reading

SmartyPants extension is based on the original SmartyPants implementation by John Gruber. Please read its documentation for details.