I've tried all manner of Python modules and they either escape too much or in the wrong way. What's the best way you've found to escape quotes (", ') in Python?
9 Answers
If it's part of a Database query you should be able to use a Parameterized SQL Statement.
As well as escaping your quotes, this will deal with all special characters and will protect you from SQL injection attacks.
Triple single quotes will conveniently encapsulate the single quotes often used in SQL queries:
c.execute('''SELECT sval FROM sdat WHERE instime > NOW() - INTERVAL '1 days' ORDER BY instime ASC''')
If you're using psycopg2 that has a method for escaping strings: psycopg2.extensions.adapt() See How to quote a string value explicitly (Python DB API/Psycopg2) for the full answer
For a solution to a more generic problem, I have a program where I needed to store any set of characters in a flat file, tab delimited. Obviously, having tabs in the 'set' was causing problems.
Instead of output_f.write(str), I used output_f.write(repr(str)), which solved my problem. It is slower to read, as I need to eval() the input when I read it, but overall, it makes the code cleaner because I don't need to check for fringe cases anymore.
For my use case, I was saving a paragraph against the database and somewhere in the paragraph there might have been some text with a single quote (example: Charlie's apple sauce was soggy)
I found this to work best:
database_cursor.execute('''INSERT INTO books.collection (book_name, book_quoted_text) VALUES ('%s', "%s")''' % (book_name, page_text.strip()))
You'll notice that I use "" after wrapping the INSERT statement in '''
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