How to escape single quotes in MySQL

Question

Put quite simply:

SELECT 'This is Ashok''s Pen.';

So inside the string, replace each single quote with two of them.

Or:

SELECT 'This is Ashok\'s Pen.'

Escape it =)

' is the escape character. So your string should be:

This is Ashok''s Pen

If you are using some front-end code, you need to do a string replace before sending the data to the stored procedure.

For example, in C# you can do

value = value.Replace("'", "''");

and then pass value to the stored procedure.

See my answer to "How to escape characters in MySQL"

Whatever library you are using to talk to MySQL will have an escaping function built in, e.g. in PHP you could use mysqli_real_escape_string or PDO::quote

Use this code:

<?php
    $var = "This is Ashok's Pen.";

    mysql_real_escape_string($var);
?>

This will solve your problem, because the database can't detect the special characters of a string.

If you use prepared statements, the driver will handle any escaping. For example (Java):

Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(driverUrl);
conn.setAutoCommit(false);
PreparedStatement prepped = conn.prepareStatement("INSERT INTO tbl(fileinfo) VALUES(?)");
String line = null;
while ((line = br.readLine()) != null) {
    prepped.setString(1, line);
    prepped.executeQuery();
}
conn.commit();
conn.close();

There is another way to do this which may or may not be safer, depending upon your perspective. It requires MySQL 5.6 or later because of the use of a specific string function: FROM_BASE64.

Let's say you have this message you'd like to insert:

"Ah," Nearly Headless Nick waved an elegant hand, "a matter of no importance. . . . It's not as though I really wanted to join. . . . Thought I'd apply, but apparently I 'don't fulfill requirements' -"

That quote has a bunch of single- and double-quotes and would be a real pain to insert into MySQL. If you are inserting that from a program, it's easy to escape the quotes, etc. But, if you have to put that into a SQL script, you'll have to edit the text (to escape the quotes) which could be error prone or sensitive to word-wrapping, etc.

Instead, you can Base64-encode the text, so you have a "clean" string:

SWtGb0xDSWdUbVZoY214NUlFaGxZV1JzWlhOeklFNXBZMnNnZD JGMlpXUWdZVzRnWld4bFoyRnVkQ0JvWVc1a0xDQWlZU0J0WVhS MFpYCklnYjJZZ2JtOGdhVzF3YjNKMFlXNWpaUzRnTGlBdUlDNG dTWFFuY3lCdWIzUWdZWE1nZEdodmRXZG9JRWtnY21WaGJHeDVJ SGRoYm5SbApaQ0IwYnlCcWIybHVMaUF1SUM0Z0xpQlVhRzkxWj JoMElFa25aQ0JoY0hCc2VTd2dZblYwSUdGd2NHRnlaVzUwYkhr Z1NTQW5aRzl1SjMKUWdablZzWm1sc2JDQnlaWEYxYVhKbGJXVn VkSE1uSUMwaUlBPT0K

Some notes about Base64-encoding:

1. Base64-encoding is a binary encoding, so you'd better make sure that you get your character set correct when you do the encoding, because MySQL is going to decode the Base64-encoded string into bytes and then interpret those. Be sure base64 and MySQL agree on what the character encoding is (I recommend UTF-8).
2. I've wrapped the string to 50 columns for readability on Stack Overflow. You can wrap it to any number of columns you want (or not wrap at all) and it will still work.

Now, to load this into MySQL:

INSERT INTO my_table (text) VALUES (FROM_BASE64(' SWtGb0xDSWdUbVZoY214NUlFaGxZV1JzWlhOeklFNXBZMnNnZD JGMlpXUWdZVzRnWld4bFoyRnVkQ0JvWVc1a0xDQWlZU0J0WVhS MFpYCklnYjJZZ2JtOGdhVzF3YjNKMFlXNWpaUzRnTGlBdUlDNG dTWFFuY3lCdWIzUWdZWE1nZEdodmRXZG9JRWtnY21WaGJHeDVJ SGRoYm5SbApaQ0IwYnlCcWIybHVMaUF1SUM0Z0xpQlVhRzkxWj JoMElFa25aQ0JoY0hCc2VTd2dZblYwSUdGd2NHRnlaVzUwYkhr Z1NTQW5aRzl1SjMKUWdablZzWm1sc2JDQnlaWEYxYVhKbGJXVn VkSE1uSUMwaUlBPT0K '));

This will insert without any complaints, and you didn't have to manually-escape any text inside the string.

You should escape the special characters using the \ character.

This is Ashok's Pen.

Becomes:

This is Ashok\'s Pen.