Hi to all,

I want to ask your opinions about what kind of quote to use in appending or using string values in our SQL statements. Is it the single quote or the double quote? For me, I think the double quote is very effective because, it can accept a string value as a whole, even if the string value has a single quote in it, (ex: Toby's), in which we could write it as "Toby's".

How about the single quote? It generates error if use would replace those double quotes in the example string above, because the string itself has a single quote in it. Putting escape characters would do the trick but isn't it a little hard to track if you are writing a lot/longer SQL statements?

Maybe there are things that I did not know about? I see many examples in books, using the single quote. Even the dump file of mySQL uses single quotes (correct me if I am wrong)?

Happy to hear from you guys!
Thanks and god bless all!

if you use double quotes then
if you use single quotes all the time
You can either swap from single to double quotes depending on what's in your string but this can look messy. I prefer to use single quotes because when you need to embed your sql in PHP you'll be able to use double quotes in your PHP code to surround the SQL and this in turn allows you to use PHP variables in your SQL. You can also just simply remove the quotes to make life easier

You will of course need to escape any use of the same quotes inside your string whatever though. Quotes are always a minefield and it's best to build up your queries slowly. It gets even more fun in unix shell where backwards quotes run what ever is within them and return the output as the string.

Mike

double quotes work only in mysql, if you should ever have a need to port your database to some other system, your queries will fail

single quotes are standard sql, whereas double quotes in standard sql are used to delimit table and column names containing special characters

furthermore, standard sql use two consecutive single quotes to escape a single quote inside a string -- mysql supports this use of standard sql (always has), even though it allows other escape characters as well