'

The typewriter’s single quote ' is used in Pascal to delimit string and character literals.

program helloWorld(input, output, stdErr);
resourcestring
    greeting = 'Hello world!';
begin
    writeLn(greeting);
end.

In order to insert a ' into a character or string literal, two ' are written back-to-back:

program singleQuoteDemo(input, output, stdErr);
begin
    writeLn('writeLn(''…'');');
end.

One may inject numeric character entities into a string, by placing them directly adjacent to one another:

program bellDemo(input, output, stdErr);
begin
    writeLn('🕭'#7);
end.

other remarks

The only forbidden character in a string or character literal is a carriage return. See bug #35827 for a (as of 2019‑08‑24) proposed feature.

In GPC " are used as string delimiters, too. Such strings can contain backslash-escaped control characters.

In ASCII the character ' has the ordinal value 39 (or hexadecimal 27).

The ’ (U+2019 “right single quotation mark”) is the typographically correct character marking the possessive case in English (e. g. “the dog’s ball”).

see also

• § “character strings” in the Free Pascal reference guide

From the Free Pascal wiki, page "'", as it stood on 2022-08-06 after a change by Kai Burghardt, out of the wiki's dump of 2024-05-26. Copyright stays with the author who wrote it, according to the old wiki's Licensing page. If you have concerns about this material, message the admin.