Neo4j how to handle special characters like ” \\ in Cypher statements

Question

I am using py2neo to load JSON data into Neo4j as chyper statements. My problem is that sometimes there are signs as “ ‘ \ etc in the strings I want to import as properties to Nodes:

MERGE (p:Node {name:’This sign ‘ gives error’})

If I change to:

MERGE (p:Node {name:” This sign ‘ gives error”})

It will work for the statement over but it will fail when a “ is in an input string.

Is there a way to say that all (or almost all) special character is allowed inside the string? Sorry if this is a stupid question :)

Answer 1

If you want to include double quotes, you can wrap in single quotes:

CREATE (n:Node {name:'hello " world'}) 
RETURN n.name

n.name
hello " world

If you want to include single quotes, you can wrap in double quotes:

CREATE (n:Node {name:"hello ' world"}) 
RETURN n.name

n.name
hello ' world

If it's more complicated than that, you can escape the character:

CREATE (n:Node {name:"hello \" world"}) 
RETURN n.name

n.name
hello " world

You can also include backslashes by escaping them:

CREATE (n:Node {name:"hello \\ world"}) 
RETURN n.name

n.name
hello \ world

Answer 2

I would suggest to use parameters, then the cypher parser doesn't see them.

And it's just an name -> string you pass via a dictionary to the execute method.