[Zope-DB] Cleaning apostrophes

[Cynthia Kiser]

Why are you using / to escape the '? It appears to be legal but I
think the more normal escape for PostGres is to use two
apostrophies. From Practical PostGreSQL:

The fact that string constants are bound by single quotes presents an
obvious semantic problem, however, in that if the sequence itself
contains a single quote, the literal bounds of the constant are made
ambiguous. To escape (make literal) a single quote within the string,
you may type two adjacent single quotes. The parser will interpret
the two adjacent single quotes within the string constant as a single,
literal single quote. PostgreSQL will also allow single quotes to be
embedded by using a C-style backslash:

Quoting Lalo Castro <laloc at ucsc.edu>:
> 	I apologize if this is a simple enough question.  I am something of 
> 	a newbie...
> 	We are using Zope 2.6.0, python 2.1.3, and pSQl 7.3.4 on a freebsd4 
> machine.
> 	There is a webform we have that has to be able to accept 
> 	apostrophes. PostgreSQL sees the apostrophes as the end of string and 
> errors out at the next character.  We've been trying to build a python 
> script to escape the apostrophes before they get sent off to the database, 
> but the writing has become problematic.  Here's the script:
> 
> import string
> unapostrophated = string.replace(apostrophated, "'", "\'")
> return (unapostrophated)
> 
> 	This doesn't work, as python sees the escape character as escaping 
> 	the apostrophe and replaces, say, "here's" with "here's" (as opposed to 
> "here\'s", which is what we want.
> 	We've also tried escaping the escape character ("\\'" which makes 
> "here\\'s"), and raw text (r"\'" which makes "here\\'s"), to no 
> solution.  PostgreSQL sees the double backslash and errors out.  Other 
> attempts were ASCII text ("\034'") and the html code ("?034:'") and 
> unicode for apostrophes ("\\a").  None of which worked.
> 	Is there a way to do this within the python script?  If I am missing 
> 	a solution using another method other than the python script, please let 
> me know.
> 		Thanks in advance for any help.
> 			Lalo
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-- 
Cynthia Kiser