Escape characters in queries

[Michel van der Breggen]

Hi all,

I'm working on a project in which we use MySQL as a database and i've come
across something i find strange but which me be completely correct. When i
type SELECT "\c"; the mysql returns c instead of \c, why does mysql
manipulate the data I put into it??? Normaly you would expect mysql to just
take the data and store it, because with the current project we run we build
the queries with an addslashes and retrieved it with stripslashes, something
that went ok untill somebody out a backslash into the database and nothing
came out.

Does anybody know how to stop this behavior??

Thanks in advance,
Michel van der Breggen

[Bill Karwin]

Michel van der Breggen wrote:

I'm working on a project in which we use MySQL as a database and i've come
across something i find strange but which me be completely correct. When i
type SELECT "\c"; the mysql returns c instead of \c, why does mysql
manipulate the data I put into it???

The backslash is a metacharacter in MySQL strings. It's in there so you
can put "\n" (newline) into your strings, for example. If you want a
literal backslash, you must use "\\".

See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/String_syntax.html

If you put a backslash in front of a character that is not one of those
with special meaning (like \b, \n, \', etc.), then the sequence simply
returns the literal character following the backslash. This behavior is
similar to many other programming languages and shells.

Regards,
Bill K.