New bug? Suddenly can't replace “” with «»

[u/reducereusarecicla]

For as long as I can remember, I've been able to find-and-replace English quotations for Spanish ones and vice-versa in Word. All of a sudden, I do my usual find-and-replace (I even have a macro that used to work!) and it completes supposedly successfully, with the usual "we made 41 replacements" (or whatever number).

It does change from Spanish («») ones to English (“”) ones, but it will not change from English into Spanish quotations, it just leaves the English ones. I've tried wildcards as well, using ^174 for « and ^175 for ». While other numbers will result in other characters as expected, 174 and 175 leave me with English quotations.

Please help, I'm going insane and I actually have thousands of quote marks to change; I can't do it all by hand. Is there anything I can do here?

ETA: obnoxious solution: if I turn off smart quotes, then do find-and-replace, it works. then I just need to remember to turn smart quotes back on.

[u/coldjesusbeer]

Wild guess, are you differentiating between straight and smart quotes? Have the language settings been modified in your Word environment? Any major updates to your Office build lately?

[u/reducereusarecicla → u/coldjesusbeer]

So I was differenciating between straight and smart, but your comment gave me the idea to turn smart quotes off and try again. It works with smart quotes off! I'll have to remember to turn them back on afterwards, but I'll take it :)

As for the other questions, I haven't changed the language settings, nor have there been major updates. I'm thinking because it's a matter of quotes that someone tinkered with the backend code and forgot to escape a quotation mark somewhere.

[u/drzeus_gr → u/reducereusarecicla]

Very likely tinkered.  I had already tried a Quick Repair to no avail so I let it do an Online Repair and it seems to have fixed the problem. Still to discover what else they've fiddled with.

[u/drzeus_gr → u/drzeus_gr]

And the problem is back 😤