I think that you want the semicolon outside the string literal:
var quote_str = '<option value="1">tea</option>';
If you mean that you want apostrophe characters inside the string also, you can use \' to put an apostrophe in a string delimited by apostrophes:
var quote_str = '\'<option value="1">tea</option>\'';
You can also use quotation marks to delimit the string. Then you don't have to escape the apostrophes, but you have to escape the quotation marks:
var quote_str = "'<option value=\"1\">tea</option>'";
If you already have a string, and want to add apostrophes around it, you concatenate strings:
var quote_str = "'" + str + "'";
var str = <option value="1">tea</option>;inside your source, then there is no way to fix this programmatically with JavaScript, since the code is not valid JS code. You have to fix the source.