MacOS – What character is this possessive apostrophe: ’

filesystemmacos

In a recent answer I needed to include a a possessive apostrophe in a path name within Time Machine for a command line operation. I have it saved in a text file, but what the heck is it? I don't see it on my keyboard.

"/Volumes/Seagate Backup Plus Drive/Backups.backupdb/david914’s MacBook Air/2015-08-30-221221/Macintosh HD/Users/david914/"

I first tried to look at it with python, but no luck.

These I know:

things = ["'", '"', "`"]
names = ["single quote", "double quote", "backtick"]
ascii = [ord(thing) for thing in things]

for (a, b, c) in zip(things, ascii, names):
    print "  " + a  + "  " + str(b) + "  " + c

  '  39  single quote
  "  34  double quote
  `  96  backtick

but the apostrophe in question is: –> ’ <–

and all I can get is:

>>> ord("’")
Unsupported characters in input

Then I used Excel:

=CODE("’")

and got:

Excel code for a character

Checking the opposite direction in Excel:

=CHAR(213)

enter image description here

Back to python:

>>> chr(213)
'\xd5'

Does this character appear normally on English MacBook Air keyboards? How else can I make them besides resorting to some kind of Office or Open Office product ?? What it is, anyway?

Best Answer

Section 6.2 of the Unicode Standard 7.0.0 states:

U+2019 […] is preferred where the character is to represent a punctuation mark, as for contractions: “We’ve been here before.”

The character does not appear directly on any keyboard I own.

On an British or US English keyboard you can use Option+Shift+] to type the character: ’ == U+2019; thanks to @tom-gewecke for this key combination.

Emoji & Symbols Palette

In OS X 10.10, you can access this character from the menu item: Edit > Emoji & Symbols:

Character Palette

Control-Click on the character to copy additional information.

In earlier versions of OS X, this palette was called the Character Palette.

Smart Quotes

The character ’ is can be automatically substituted by OS X through the Smart Quotes feature of the default text system:

Smart Quotes screenshot

Unicode is Complex

Copying and pasting a few of the candidate character information to a text file results in:

  • ' - APOSTROPHE, Unicode: U+0027, UTF-8: 27
  • ʼ - MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE, Unicode: U+02BC, UTF-8: CA BC
  • ՚ - ARMENIAN APOSTROPHE, Unicode: U+055A, UTF-8: D5 9A
  • ＇ - FULLWIDTH APOSTROPHE, Unicode: U+FF07, UTF-8: EF BC 87

Ted Clancy's article Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong.) reveals just how involved the unicode character set can become.

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