title: SmartyPants Extension
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SmartyPants
===========

Summary
-------

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

ASCII symbol | Replacements    | HTML Entities
------------ | --------------- | -------------------
'        | ‘ ’ | `‘` `’`
"       | “ ” | `“` `”`
\...         | …        | `…`
\--          | –         | `–`
-\--         | —         | `—`

!!! note
    This extension reimplements the Python [SmartyPants] 
    library by intregated 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.
    
[SmartyPants]: http://pythonhosted.org/smartypants/
[CodeHilite]: code_hilite.html

Usage
-----

See [Extensions](index.html) for general extension usage, specify `smarty`
as the name of the extension.

See the [Library Reference](../reference.html#extensions) for information about
configuring extensions.

The following options are provided to configure the output (all three are set to `True` by default):

Option           | Description
------           | -----------
`smart_dashes`   | whether to convert dashes
`smart_quotes`   | whether to convert quotes
`smart_ellipses` | whether to convert ellipses

Further reading
---------------

SmartyPants extension is based on the original SmartyPants implementation
by John Gruber. Please read it's [documentation][1] for details.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/