Need CKEditor to encode special characters

I would like CKEditor to encode all special characters. Currently it only html escapes >, <, and & I believe.

I need the current html markup of this

Let's take a "ride!"

to become something like this

Let’s take a “ride!”

In this situation, the Let's take a "ride!" is still what would display to the user, but the html should reflect the encoding so my styling is properly applied.

I am seeing that Drupal 7 had a config.js file that could be modified to accommodate this; however, Drupal 8 does not have this by default and does not seem to recognize it when one is created.

Does anyone know how I can make this happen?

EDIT: our content authors are using the Basic HTML editor permissions.