Replace single quotes with doubles

[quiddity]

Hello,

I’m copy-editing a book with many quotations. The publisher wants all quotations etc in curly double quote marks, thus: “lorum ipsum”. So of course, the author has put everything in single quote marks: ‘lorum ipsum’. Correcting each instance of this as I go is driving me crazy – but so is trying to work out how to do it mechanically with find and replace, or regular expressions! Has anyone got a clue?

Limitations/complications:

I can’t just f&r all single left quotes and then all single right ones – because that would also replace all the apostrophes.

The trailing punctuation is sometimes inside and sometimes outside the quotation marks.

There has to be an easy way to do this, surely?! Thanks!

This is in LibreOffice writer version 4.2.8.2, English, on Kubuntu 14.04

[Lupp]

We might need an additional hint by what the apostrophes are syntactically to distinguish from the single quotation marks (these also curly? - how else would you find the left ones and the right ones separately?). A relevant portion of text containing examples for everithing that worries you should be very useful. You surely know that there also exist different styles of using the quotes (lead in low or high e.g.)… I cannot think of a solution without knowing more detail.

[karolus]

Hallo

search for ‘([^’]+)’ replace with “$1” of course with Option [x]regular Expression should do the job, if there are no single single-curlys in the Text – in that case you should iterate manually with →→find next instead →→replace all

[rafaelsocialuser]

Doesn’t works when there are “carriage returns” (new paragraph) format marks among the text between single quotes