diff --git a/toot/tui/richtext.py b/toot/tui/richtext.py
index 6d83804..d311d1f 100644
--- a/toot/tui/richtext.py
+++ b/toot/tui/richtext.py
@@ -4,8 +4,9 @@ richtext
 from typing import List, Tuple
 import urwid
 import unicodedata
+
+from toot.utils import bs4_parse
 from .constants import PALETTE
-from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
 from bs4.element import NavigableString, Tag
 
 
@@ -21,7 +22,7 @@ class ContentParser:
         """Convert html to urwid widgets"""
         widgets: List[urwid.Widget] = []
         html = unicodedata.normalize("NFKC", html)
-        soup = BeautifulSoup(html.replace("'", "'"), "html.parser")
+        soup = bs4_parse(html)
         for e in soup.body or soup:
             if isinstance(e, NavigableString):
                 continue
diff --git a/toot/utils/__init__.py b/toot/utils/__init__.py
index e8103ac..7b47dc4 100644
--- a/toot/utils/__init__.py
+++ b/toot/utils/__init__.py
@@ -24,15 +24,22 @@ def str_bool_nullable(b):
 
 def get_text(html):
     """Converts html to text, strips all tags."""
+    text = bs4_parse(html).get_text()
+    return unicodedata.normalize("NFKC", text)
+
+
+def bs4_parse(html: str) -> BeautifulSoup:
+    # Versions of BeautifulSoup before 4.8.0 do not convert ' to '
+    # correctly so replace it before decoding. Required in case someone still
+    # uses an older version.
+    html = html.replace("'", "'")
 
     # Ignore warnings made by BeautifulSoup, if passed something that looks like
     # a file (e.g. a dot which matches current dict), it will warn that the file
     # should be opened instead of passing a filename.
     with warnings.catch_warnings():
         warnings.simplefilter("ignore")
-        text = BeautifulSoup(html.replace(''', "'"), "html.parser").get_text()
-
-    return unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', text)
+        return BeautifulSoup(html, "html.parser")
 
 
 def parse_html(html):