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Single quotation marks are used to indicate quotations inside of other quotations. “Jessie said, 'Goodbye,'” Ben said. This is Ben talking, so his words go in quotation marks. But because we're quoting Ben quoting someone else, Jessie, we use single quotation marks to indicate the quote within the quote.
Single quote ' and double " quotes are used to wrap strings. There is no real difference between them except that JSON doesn't accept the single quote.
Answer 50c23ca9513b6c0bb6006d0a In the real world, yes, you can use both double or single quotes. However, the HTML standard is double qoutes first, then single quotes if you have data with double quotes.
This is similar to When did single quotes in HTML become so popular?. Single quotes around attributes in HTML are and always have been permitted by the specification. I don't think any browsers wouldn't understand them.
As noted by PhiLho, although there is a widely spread belief that single quotes are not allowed for attribute values, that belief is wrong.
The XML standard permits both single and double quotes around attribute values.
The XHTML standard doesn't say anything to change this, but a related section which states that attribute values must be quoted uses double quotes in the example, which has probably lead to this confusion. This example is merely pointing out that attribute values in XHTML must meet the minimum standard for attribute values in XML, which means they must be quoted (as opposed to plain HTML which doesn't care), but does not restrict you to either single or double quotes.
Of course, it's always possible that you'll encounter a parser which isn't standards-compliant, but when that happens all bets are off anyway. So it's best to just stick to what the specification says. That's why we have specifications, after all.
I have heard people saying that single quotes for HTML fields is not recognized by EVERY browser
That person is wrong.
Don't believe everything you see on Internet...
Funnily, I just answered something similar to somebody declaring single quotes are not valid in XHTML...
Mmm, I look above while typing, and see that Adam N propagates the same belief. If he can back up his affirmation, I retract what I wrote... AFAIK, XML is agnostic and accepts both kinds of quote. I even tried and validated without problem an XHTML page with only single quotes.
Only problem is data going into TEXT INPUT fields. Consider
<input value='it's gonna break'/>
Same with:
<input value="i say - "this is gonna be trouble" "/>
You can't escape that, you have to use htmlspecialchars.
As I was looking to find information on this in a much more recent version of the specification and it took me quite some time to find it, here it is:
From
HTML
Living Standard — Last Updated 17 September 2021
[...]
13.1.2.3 Attributes
Single-quoted attribute value syntax
The attribute name, followed by zero or more ASCII whitespace, followed by a single U+003D EQUALS SIGN character, followed by zero or more ASCII whitespace, followed by a single U+0027 APOSTROPHE character ('), followed by the attribute value, which, in addition to the requirements given above for attribute values, must not contain any literal U+0027 APOSTROPHE characters ('), and finally followed by a second single U+0027 APOSTROPHE character (').
In the following example, the type attribute is given with the single-quoted attribute value syntax:
<input type='checkbox'>
If an attribute using the single-quoted attribute syntax is to be followed by another attribute, then there must be ASCII whitespace separating the two.
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#attributes-2
I also tend to use single quotes in HTML and I have never experienced a problem.
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