Hi,
This is not ' but '
In fact, it's just an apostrophe but it was poorly encoded/decoded, that's all.
Edit: by the way, it seems that this escape code for the apostrophe was added in XML/XHTML but is not officially supported in HTML, which may lead to display issues.
Let's imagine someone says:
I don't like the lack of experience. it means:
I don't like the lack of experience.
Indeed, the "'" means: apostrophe. It's simply a coding error.