title: How to escape single quotes in reStructuredText when converting to HTML using Sphinx
body: <p>For a documentation project I am writing I need to include a table with date format strings. Now almost everything works fine, but at the end I have this slight problem where I want to print a literal ' quote and two literal quotes (separately and between other quotes). Sphinx changes these to up/down quotes, which usually looks really neat, but in this particular case makes the text unreadable. The best I could come up with was: </p>
  
  <pre><code>======   ===========   ======  =====================
  ``'``    Escape for            | " ``'`` hour ``'`` h" -&gt; "hour 9"
           for text 
           Delimiter
  ``''``   Single                | "ss ``''`` SSS" -&gt; "45 ``'`` 876"
           quote 
           Literal  
  ======   ===========   ======  =====================
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This produces all the right quotes, but it inserts extra spaces before and after, which I would like to see removed, since the example is not syntactically correct that way. So one could also rephrase my question as: How to remove extra spaces before and after literal quotes when using backticks.</p>
  
  <p>I have tried standard ways of escaping. Backslashes have no effect, since ' is not a reStructuredText special character. If I remove the spaces the backticks `` won't work anymore.</p>
  
  <p>Sample output with extra spaces:
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/CF9It.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>