This is an excellent question. After some research, it appears that the apostrophe character is expressed in UTF-8 as E2 80 99, and prints this character: instead of the tick mark '. Modern text editors / word processors such as Word, Pages, etc will auto-change ’ to , as the typography is more pleasant that way.
The problem this introduces is that the apostrophe character was not included in the original ASCII character set, so it is must be interepreted as UTF-8. This should be all well and good, as Xojo has good support for multiple encodings.
Now, as to your question: I’m storing this string as a constant, where it appears there is no way to define the encoding. This means that in the IDE when laying out the window, if I set the value of the label to be #THE_NAME_OF_THE_CONSTANT it goes ahead and wires up the label to show the value of the named constant, with the incorrect character shown as I can only assume it is not encoding things correctly.
At runtime, I suppose I could re-set all the labels by running the constants through a defineEncoding() call, but why should I have to?
Is there really no way to define an encoding on a string constant?