markdown problem with single quote (causing highlighting)

Question

I tried to correct an answer and made it worse: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/78199/32191

The author used â instead of ' (in "don't"). As he was quoting a man page he used both ">" for marking as a quote and " " for making the text formatted as code. Like this:

   --skip-old-files
          don't replace existing files when extracting, silently skip over them

This is evil. The problem does not occur here. Have a look at the linked answer. In the answer the single quote causes unwanted highlighting effects. I cannot get rid of them by prepending a backslash because the backslash is shown then. It seems that the single quote is not considered a special markup character. Should I avoid this problem by using real (Unicode) apostrophe? "don’t"

Answer 1

The "code" is being syntax-highlighted as a bash script because the question has the bash tag. You can override it by putting a comment before the code block:

<!-- language: lang-none -->

But the real solution in this case is to not use code blocks for non-code, particularly within a block quote