In response to jkells <jtkells@xxxxxxxxxxx>: > General coding question. Can I insert a text string into a character > varying column that contains a \ as is, meaning no escaping of the > character or is this a bad practice? > > I.e: Column data > ========== ==================================== > description SUBDIV LOT 13 & N1\2 LOT 14 This is a moderately confusing issue because standards are involved, and standards frequently muddle things. According to the SQL standard, there is nothing special about \. It's just another character and is not treated specially in any way. PostgreSQL, for a long while, treated the \ as starting an escape character sequence, because this was common in many databases an generally useful for adding things like newlines. At some point (don't know when) the escaping syntax was added. This made it possible for PostgreSQL to be 100% ANSI SQL compliant while still supporting the old method of using the \ to start an escape sequence. The two critical tools for working with this are the standard_conforming_strings config parameter and the E'' syntax for strings. Documentation is here: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/runtime-config-compatible.html http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/sql-syntax-lexical.html#SQL-SYNTAX-CONSTANTS Unfortunately, it's just a _bit_ more complicated than that, even, because the language you're using on the client side (which you don't mention) may also use the \ as a special character, so it may be converted to something before it's even transmitted to PostgreSQL. So, the direct answer to your question is, "There's nothing wrong or bad form about putting \ in your strings, but it can be difficult to do correctly, depending on the circumstances." -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
