How do I insert a special character such as ' into MySQL?

Question

I am executing the insert query from a shell script which reads data from multiple files. Some of the data to be inserted contains \' in the text a

Answer 1

Yo need to escape the ' character with a backslash \

Women\'s Development & Empowerment, Youth Affairs

Answer 2

You need to escape your quote. You can do this by doubling it in your insert query; i.e. use '' rather than '. That is two single quotes rather than a single double quote.

Answer 3

You will have to escape the input strings before passing them to MySql.

The list of escape characters is:

Character   Escape Sequence
\0  An ASCII NUL (0x00) character.
\'  A single quote (“'”) character.
\"  A double quote (“"”) character.
\b  A backspace character.
\n  A newline (linefeed) character.
\r  A carriage return character.
\t  A tab character.
\Z  ASCII 26 (Control-Z). See note following the table.
\\  A backslash (“\”) character.
\%  A “%” character. See note following the table.
\_  A “_” character. See note following the table.

Answer 4

You need to escape the quote, like so:

'Women\'s Development & Empowerment, Youth Affairs'

Note, that if you're generating the SQL statement from a language like PHP, there are functions available to do this for you.

In PHP, for instance, there is mysql_real_escape_string, which takes care of it for you. Note, that prepared statements are to be prefered over this, as it's harder to get those wrong.

See also:

• The MySQL manual entry on strings
• PHP PDO prepared statements

Answer 5

What is the server side languge you using?

there are many methods through which you can escape string , i'll prefer that!

Eg: you can use mysql_escape_string the data you are entering in query so it will automatically escape charecters like " ' "

mysql_escape_string is a php function provided you are using php