5

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?

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  • 1
    char 213 (decimal) or d5 (hex) is the right single quote represented in the old MacRoman character set. OS X uses Unicode, where it is U+2019. From the keyboard this is normally made via option shift ] – Tom Gewecke Sep 4 '15 at 9:56
  • Thanks @TomGewecke ! That is in fact an alternate answer - what the heck is this thing and how can I make more of them? – uhoh Sep 4 '15 at 10:08
  • Does it not work to make them using option shift ] ? – Tom Gewecke Sep 4 '15 at 10:11
  • I meant that as a compliment @TomGewecke ! It works perfectly! I wanted to highlight the fact that in 201 characters you both explained what that character is, and gave me a way to easily make more of them. So you actually answered both parts of my question with one sentence. Great! – uhoh Sep 4 '15 at 14:32
7

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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    Wow! Thank you for putting all of that in one place. I am relieved to see that my question was at least not trivial. After reading all of that, I am hesitant to use the possessive form or contractions ever again, lest I use the wrong character and Ted finds out about it! :) – uhoh Sep 4 '15 at 9:01
  • Good to hear the answer helped. Internationalisation is a difficult problem to tackle. – Graham Miln Sep 4 '15 at 9:05
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    The US keyboard makes U+2019 via option shift ] – Tom Gewecke Sep 4 '15 at 9:57

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