String substitution VS proper mysql escaping

Gregory Ewing greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz
Mon Aug 30 04:11:06 EDT 2010


Nik the Greek wrote:

> Yes i will i just asked to know if i were to substitute what might be
> the problem so to understand why i need the quoting.

Because if you use % to build a query string, the result must
be syntactically valid SQL. The values that you substitute
into the placeholders must end up looking like SQL literals.
That means string values need to be in quotes, and probably
dates as well, although numbers don't.

When you use the execute method's own parameter substitution
mechanism, things are different. It's not a textual replacement,
and you don't put quotes around the placeholders. There's no
particular reason for that, it's just the way it's defined
to work.

-- 
Greg



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