Question

I’m putting the finishing touches on a home rolled QueryBuilder class for a web application with a postgresql DB. It uses PreparedStatement for all queries and is protected against SQL injection.

However I wanted a “quick and dirty” way of representing the QueryBuilder with its toString() method, only for debugging purposes. The method will assemble the query string as is normally passed into the PreparedStatement, then simply replace each ? in the string with its corresponding single-quoted value. The toString() javadoc will warn other devs that it’s an unsafe approximation only to be used for debugging, etc etc.

I know the values should have their single quotes doubled up (ie O'Connell escapes to O''Connell). Are there any other special characters that should be dealt with that I’m forgetting? I looked for similar questions but only found people getting scolded to use PreparedStatement (which they should, let the record show).

EDIT: not looking to use a third party tool for this particular task, I really just want the quick and dirty here. I do appreciate the links all the same though – I may consider them for other uses.

LAST EDIT: thanks to all for the helpful pointers. I just want to add that for anyone who stumbles in here from google, do not use these tricks for anything hitting the database, use PreparedStatement.

Answer 1

For “quick and dirty” escaping, doubling the apostrophes is good enough. Be aware of question marks already inside string literals, though:

SELECT column FROM table WHERE column = 'A question?' or column = ?

You don’t want to replace the first question mark. Also, these corner-cases should be taken care of:

SELECT /* Is this a comment?? */ * FROM table
-- -- --  Another comment??
WHERE column = ?

There’s only one bind value in that statement. For a less quick-and-dirty solution, you could use a library like jOOQ for this problem, though (disclaimer: I work for the company behind jOOQ). It’ll do the inlining for you, also for the more nasty data types:

DSLContext ctx = DSL.using(SQLDialect.POSTGRES);
Object[] bindValues = { 1, "a'bc", Date.valueOf("2012-09-24"), "xy".getBytes() };
String string = ctx.query(
  "SELECT 1 WHERE A = ? AND B = ? AND C = ? AND D = ?",
  bindValues).toString();

The above will render

SELECT 1 
WHERE A = 1 
AND B = 'a''bc'
AND C = date '2012-09-24' 
AND D = E'\\170\\171::bytea