I'm new to WordPress and recently had the following issue: Some (though oddly not all) single and double quotes in code snippets were being converted to curly quotes which a) looked bad and b) caused them to be ignored by the syntax highlighter I'm using (Dan Webb's CodeHighlighter). This helpful thread offers several ways to address the issue: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/125038. Though I'm beginning to feel a bit queasy about WordPress.