How to anticipate and escape single quote ' in oracle

Question

Suppose I have a column value as aaa\'gh it will throw error in oracle saying sql command not properly ended.

My question is if I don\'t know how many <

Answer 1

My simple approach with this problem, was always to just use

replace(string, '''', '''''')

but Lalit Kumar B solution, seems more sophisticated

Answer 2

The best way is to use the quoting string literal technique. The syntax is q'[...]', where the "[" and "]" characters can be any of the following as long as they do not already appear in the string.

• !
• [ ]
• { }
• ( )
• < >

You don't have to worry about the single-quotation marks within the string.

Suppose i have a column value as aaa'gh

So you could simply write the SQL as,

SELECT q'[aaa'gh]' FROM DUAL;

It saves a lot of time for developers. Gone are those days when we(developers) used to verify the dynamic sql using dbms_output in development DB, just to make sure things are at place before moving into production.