how to escape single quotes in grep

Question

I found a few questions here similar to this but they are not quite identical.

I want to grep for the text 'true' format in certain files.

How do I do it?

Not sure how to escape the single quotes around true.

Answer 1

Just wrap the string within double quotes:

grep "'true' format" your_file

Test

$ cat a
this is 'true' format
and this is true formatting
test

$ grep "'true' format" a
this is 'true' format

Answer 2

If you can use the -P (Perl regex syntax) flag of grep, then you can encode ' as \x27 in the pattern:

grep -P '\x27true\x27 format' file.txt

(Similarly, for " use \x22)