Extending The Curly Quotes Module is fun!
With a little understanding of how RegEx works, you can do all sorts of fun things.
For instance, I added the following into my ‘Curly Quotes’ template:
s|&([^#])|&$1|g
Which does what you may ask? Well, it does the same thing as the Hivelogic URL Cleaner.
It finds all instances of an & in the site, and converts it to the equivalent symbolic notation (&), except when it is followed by a # (indicating it’s already a symbolic notation of something).
As an added bonus, this version will clean up your &‘s all over the place, so your page will validate.
Well, except for that pesky RDF thing.
There is a downside, in that I’m now force to used numeric symbolic equivalents instead of the handy shortcuts (like < instead of <), but I’m sure I’ll figure out some workaround for that too.
Perhaps if I simply replace all those with their numerical equivalents before replacing the ampersand? I’ll sleep on this one.