My preferred options for SmartyPants in Python

smartypants.smartypants(…, Attr.default | Attr.u)

I wanted to add curly quotes and dashes to some text in Python, so I looked at the smartypants library. This is the code I used:

import smartypants

text = '"hello world"'
attrs = smartypants.Attr.default | smartypants.Attr.u

print(smartypants.smartypants(text, attrs))  # “hello world”

I set two processing attributes that control the behaviour, which you combine with bitwise OR:

• Attr.default is the default set of attributes, which converts curly quotes, backticks, dashes, and ellipses
• Attr.u returns Unicode characters instead of numeric character references, for example “hello world” instead of “hello world”. You can include UTF-8 in HTML files, and the Unicode characters are easier to read in non-HTML contexts.