Question

I wrote the database schema (only one table so far), and the INSERT statements for that table in one file. Then I created the database as follows:

$ sqlite3 newdatabase.db SQLite version 3.4.0 Enter ".help" for instructions sqlite> .read ./schema.sql SQL error near line 16: near "s": syntax error 

Line 16 of my file looks something like this:

INSERT INTO table_name (field1, field2) VALUES (123, 'Hello there\'s'); 

The problem is the escape character for a single quote. I also tried double escaping the single quote (using \\\' instead of \'), but that didn’t work either. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Try doubling up the single quotes (many databases expect it that way), so it would be :

INSERT INTO table_name (field1, field2) VALUES (123, 'Hello there''s'); 

Relevant quote from the documentation:

A string constant is formed by enclosing the string in single quotes (‘). A single quote within the string can be encoded by putting two single quotes in a row – as in Pascal. C-style escapes using the backslash character are not supported because they are not standard SQL. BLOB literals are string literals containing hexadecimal data and preceded by a single ‘x’ or ‘X’ character. … A literal value can also be the token ‘NULL’.