There are three quoting mechanisms: the escape character, single quotes, and double quotes. A non-quoted backslash (\) is the escape character. It preserves the literal value of the next character that follows, with the exception of <newline>.

If a \<newline> pair appears, and the backslash is not itself quoted, the \<newline> is treated as a line continuation (that is, it is removed from the input stream and effectively ignored).

Enclosing characters in single quotes preserves the literal value of
each character within the quotes. A single quote may not occur Between single quotes, even when preceded by a backslash.

Enclosing characters in double quotes preserves the literal value of all characters within the quotes, with the exception of $, ‘, and \. The characters $ and ‘ retain their special meaning within double quotes. The backslash retains its special meaning only when followed
by one of the following characters: $, ‘, ", \, or <newline>. A double quote may be quoted within double quotes by preceding it with a backslash. When command history is being used, the double quote may not be used to quote the history expansion character.

result=`wget \'${url}\'`
echo ${result}

It is absolutely vital that I use single quotes here, just like this, or the operation won't work (long story about wget, but trust me there's no other way)

That sounds like an interesting story in itself, please elaborate :-)

I assume the URL in question contains "interesting" characters which cause some breakage when used with double quotes on the command line. Have you tried using wget -i instead?

This is basically the problem I'm having:
...

This is basically the problem I'm having:

http://www.planetmike.com/2005/04/12...th-ampersands/

I'll give wget -i a try, but putting the URLs in a file would be highly impractical...this script iterates through a list of URLs using cut.