HTML code for an apostrophe

Question

Seemingly simple, but I cannot find anything relevant on the web.

What is the correct HTML code for an apostrophe? Is it ’?

Answer 1

Use ' for a straight apostrophe. This tends to be more readable than the numeric ' (if others are ever likely to read the HTML directly).

Edit: msanders points out that ' isn't valid HTML4, which I didn't know, so follow most other answers and use '.

Answer 2

Sorry if this offends anyone, but there is a reasonable article on Ted Clancy's blog that argues against the Unicode committee's recommendation to use ’ (RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK) and proposes using U+02BC (MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE) (aka ʼ or ʼ) instead.

In a nutshell, the article argues that:

• A punctuation mark (such as a quotation mark) normally separates words and phrases, while the sides of a contraction really can't be separated and still make sense.
• Using a modifier allows one to select a contraction with the regular expression \w+
• It's easier to parse quotes embedded in text if there aren't quotation marks also appearing in contractions

Answer 3

It's '.

As noted by msanders, this is actually XML and XHTML but not defined in HTML4, so I guess use the ' in that case. I stand corrected.

Answer 4

Depends on which apostrophe you are talking about: there’s ', ‘, ’ and probably numerous other ones, depending on the context and the language you’re intending to write. And with a declared character encoding of e.g. UTF-8 you can also write them directly into your HTML: ', ‘, ’.

Answer 5

You can try ' as seen in http://unicodinator.com/#0027

Answer 6

I've found FileFormat.info's Unicode Character Search to be most helpful in finding exact character codes.

Entering simply ' (the character to the left of the return key on my US Mac keyboard) into their search yields several results of various curls and languages.

I would presume the original question was asking for the typographically correct U+02BC ʼ, rather than the typewriter fascimile U+0027 '.

The W3C recommends hex codes for HTML entities (see below). For U+02BC that would be ʼ, rather than ' for U+0027.

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-escapes

Using character escapes in markup and CSS

Hex vs. decimal. Typically when the Unicode Standard refers to or lists characters it does so using a hexadecimal value. … Given the prevalence of this convention, it is often useful, though not required, to use hexadecimal numeric values in escapes rather than decimal values…

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html

5 HTML Document Representation … 5.4 Undisplayable characters

…If missing characters are presented using their numeric representation, use the hexadecimal (not decimal) form, since this is the form used in character set standards.