Escape single quotes and wild cards ‘%’ , ‘_’ in MS SQL

 

To escape single quotes ( ‘ ) in MS SQL all you need to do is add two single quotes instead of one.

Ex. If you want to insert the name D’souza into MS SQL the query goes like this:

INSERT into name_column ([name]) VALUES (‘D”Souza’)

Look carefully. We have replaced single quote in between the letter D and the word SOUZA with two SINGLE QUOTES. (It’s not a double quote)

 

 

Similarly, you may also face a problem while querying for values which contain the characters ‘%’ and ‘_’ in them. This is so because SQL considers these two characters as wild cards for multiple characters and single character string matching.

There are 2 ways to escape these wild cards.

1. You can use the default square braces “[]” like this- [%] or [_]

2. You can define your own escape character by using the keyword ESCAPE at the end of your where clause.

Ex. select * from name_column where name like ‘gyan\_sagar’ ESCAPE ‘\’

In the example above we escape “_” by defining “\” as an escape character using the ESCAPE keyword.

Note: You can only define a single character for escaping and not a string.