Replacing “smart quotes” in powershell

UPDATE: Fixed my answer (manojlds comments were correct, the $_ thing was a red herring). Here's a version that works, and I've updated it to incorporate your testing code:

    $srcUrl="https://raw.github.com/gist/1129778/d4d899088ce7da19c12d822a711ab24e457c023f/gistfile1.txt"    $wc = New-Object net.WebClient    $wc.DownloadFile($srcUrl,"C:\Users\hartez\SO6968270\foo.txt")    $fancySingleQuotes = "[\u2019\u2018]"     $fancyDoubleQuotes = "[\u201C\u201D]"     $c = Get-Content "foo.txt" -Encoding UTF8    $c | % { `        $_ = [regex]::Replace($_, $fancySingleQuotes, "'")           [regex]::Replace($_, $fancyDoubleQuotes, '"')         } `    |  Set-Content "foo2.txt"

The reason that manojlds version wasn't working for you is that the encoding on the file you're getting from github wasn't compatible with the Unicode characters in the regex. Reading it in as UTF-8 fixes the problem.

The following works on the input and output that you had given:

    $c = Get-Content $file     $c | % { `        $_ = $_.Replace("’","'")        $_ = $_.Replace("`“","`"")        $_.Replace("`”","`"")        } `        |  Set-Content $file

Your last replace, pleaces a left fancy quote with and single quote. Is that what you want? it doesn't match your sample output. Try this:

$_.Replace("`“","`"")$_.Replace("`”","`"")