The
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
character (U+2019 ) is used both for a
typographic apostrophe and a single right (closing)
quotation mark
Quotation marks (also known as quotes, quote marks, speech marks, inverted commas, or talking marks) are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to set off direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an ...
. This is due to the many fonts and character sets (such as
CP1252
Windows-1252 or CP-1252 (code page 1252) is a single-byte character encoding of the Latin alphabet, used by default in the legacy components of Microsoft Windows for English and many European languages including Spanish, French, and German.
It i ...
) that unified the characters into a single code point, and the difficulty of software distinguishing which character is intended by a user's typing. There are arguments that the typographic apostrophe should be a different code point, U+02BC
.
Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong.)
/ref>
The straight apostrophe (the "ASCII apostrophe", ) is even more ambiguous, as it could also be intended as a left or right quotation mark, or a prime symbol
The prime symbol , double prime symbol , triple prime symbol , and quadruple prime symbol are used to designate units and for other purposes in mathematics, science, linguistics and music.
Although the characters differ little in appearance fr ...
.
See also
* General Punctuation
General Punctuation is a Unicode block containing punctuation, spacing, and formatting characters for use with all scripts and writing systems. Included are the defined-width spaces, joining formats, directional formats, smart quotes, archaic an ...
(Unicode block)
References
{{reflist
Punctuation