<p>In textmate, when there's a current selection, I hit the " key and the selection gets surrounded by quotes. The same thing happens with other balanced characters like (, {, [ and '.</p>

<p>Am I missing something obvious in Emacs configuration that would enable similar behaviour when using transient mark mode, or do I need to break out elisp and write something?</p>

[{'answer_id': 72802, 'author': 'Clinton Dreisbach', 'author_id': 6262, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/6262', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>wrap-region.el from <a href="http://sami.samhuri.net/2007/6/23/emacs-for-textmate-junkies" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this guy\'s blog post</a> will do what you\'re looking for.</p>\n\n<p><a href="http://mumble.net/~campbell/emacs/paredit.el" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Paredit</a> will complete the TextMate-style quoting. When you type one part of a matched pair (quotes, brackets, parentheses, etc), the second will be inserted and the insertion point is moved between them, much like TextMate.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 2534374, 'author': 'joao', 'author_id': 177259, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/177259', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>Try <a href="http://autopair.googlecode.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://autopair.googlecode.com</a></p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 2551209, 'author': 'Singletoned', 'author_id': 46715, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/46715', 'pm_score': 0, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>You should check out these older, very similar, questions:</p>\n\n<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1023770/automatically-closing-braces-in-emacs/1024531#1024531">Automatically closing braces in Emacs?</a></p>\n\n<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/848647/emacs-typeover-skeleton-pair-insert-maybe/849218#849218">Emacs typeover skeleton-pair-insert-maybe</a></p>\n\n<p>Although the correct answer is Joao\'s above;  I\'m about to go and change my answer to those questions, to point to autopair.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/72732', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/423836/']