The following french text:
l'élève, l'`île <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island>`__.
Is interpreted as:
<p>l’élève, l”<a class="reference external" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island">île</a>.</p>
Where the ' is replaced with ” in the second case.
https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/6615
reproducible with french smartquotes::
rst2html.py --language=fr --smart-quotes --
could you please have a look at
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/smartquotes.html#algorithmic-shortcomings
maybe consider using ’ in the rst-file
I could indeed use the smart quote, but it is not on my keyboard and as I am programming I would like to use the same quote in Python and in my rst documentation. It seems legit to use ' (U+0027)
As described in the link given by Engelbert, the problem cannot be solved due to an ambiguity of ' as apostrophe and second level quotation sign.
This is one of the reasons why Docutils has "smart quotes" as an opt-in setting
(cf. http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/smartquotes.html#why-you-might-not-want-to-use-smart-quotes-in-your-documents).
Sphinx has smart quotes "on" by default but you can set it off in your Sphinx configuration.