There is a way to add something before the ' to indicate to QGIS that it is a string and not a column. In expression builder I simply want
"temperature" || ''C'
You are almost there. However, you need one extra backslash \
. It is used to escape any special character.
"temperature" || '\'C'
Another option can be achieved via:
concat("temperature", char(39), 'C')
where char(39)
- is the Apostrophe in Unicode.