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I am writing a casebook with a law professor using TexShop, and a large portion of project are legal cases, all of which have "quotes" and not ``quotes''

I know the programming difficulties of auto-replacement, but anything is better than doing this manually for four hundred pages of material.

I am not looking for a magic button, but what would be great is a workflow for converting quote marks before putting the cases into the latex document.

I know this is an old problem, and I know a perfect solution is not feasible, but something quick and dirty that works with copy and pasting large blocks of text would make me a very happy person.

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I personally would just do a search&replace for ` "` (note the leading space) to only catch quotes in front of words. –  Martin Scharrer Jun 30 '11 at 17:16
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To replace all or most of the left-quotes, use something like this:

sed 's/"\([a-z]\)/``\1/g' < infile > outfile

Then the only quotes left will hopefully be right-quotes, so you can just find and replace them with two single quote marks.

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While I read XKCD on a regular basis, I still don't know how to take a command line suggestion like that and actually use it to edit files. –  LawMan Jun 30 '11 at 18:50
So the sed suggestion wins the day! Here is the final sed code I am using: s/"\([a-z]\)/``\1/g s/"/''/g s/§/ \\S \\ /g s/&/\\&/g s/\$/\\\$/g If anyone has any lines to suggest that would be great. One that would be very helpful would be to auto delete 123*456 page references. I used texhelpers sed program as a gui front end. –  LawMan Jun 30 '11 at 19:54
@LawMan: If sam's answer solves your problem, you should up vote it and accept it. It looks like you have another question as well, but I can't figure out what exactly you mean. In any case, you should ask it as a separate question, possibly on stackoverflow as it seems like it doesn't have anything to do with TeX (but I could be wrong about that). –  TH. Jun 30 '11 at 20:14
Can't vote up, not enough rep. –  LawMan Jun 30 '11 at 21:06
I think it's better to use \enquote{} from csquotes package. That way you can easily fix quotes whenever you change language, etc. Here is my exemplary style I had to define for Polish texts: \DeclareQuoteStyle{polish}{\quotedblbase}{\textquotedblright}{\quotesinglbase}{‌​\textquoteright} –  przemoc Jun 30 '11 at 23:07
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