Question

I am trying to query a name (Daniel O’Neal) in column names tblStudents in an Access database, however Access reports a syntax error with the statement:

Select * from tblStudents where name like 'Daniel O'Neal'

due to the apostrophe in the name.

How do I overcome this?

Answer 1

You escape ' by doubling it, so:

Select * from tblStudents where name like 'Daniel O''Neal' 

Note that if you’re accepting “Daniel O’Neal” from user input, the broken quotation is a serious security issue. You should always sanitize the string or use parametrized queries.