SmartyPants is a tool for converting plain ASCII punctuation characters into "smart" HTML entities, such as "straight" quotes into "curly" quotes and "---" into em-dashes.
SmartyPants was originally written in Perl by John Gruber. See http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/.
Chad Miller then ported it to Python (http://web.chad.org/projects/smartypants.py/), and Hao Lian packaged it and put it on PyPI (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/smartypants).
This version makes just one small tweak to the PyPI version. It adds the
<tt> tag to the list of skipped tags. Since reStructuredText renders
inline literals as <tt> tags, this is important so as not to introduce
curly quotes into inline code snippets.
Jeff Schenck <http://jeffschenck.com/>