Please, I don't mean this to be offensive. I'm not. It was suggested that the syntax "[Ben's table]" is cumbersome. What is really cumbersome, in my opinion, is the table name itself. The table name includes an white space (space) and a delimiting character (apostrophe.) The simple table name has lots of junk in it that will throw a left hook to many language parsers.
To simplify everything, just name the table BensTable. Camel case the words, drop the spaces. Everything is still very readable and makes sense. dvn On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 4:17 AM, Benoit Mortgat <mort...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have a database with a table name containing a quote and a space. > Let's say it's called “Ben's table” > > I have created it with: > > CREATE TABLE "Ben's table" ([column_spec]); > > I tried the following in the SQLite shell: > > .import 'file_name.txt' "Ben's table" > > But that does not work. So I had to dig a bit into shell.c to > understand, and I found the following: > > * inside the do_meta_command function, the arguments to dot-commands > are tokenized with the following rules: > > * The tokenizer skips all whitespace character when finding the > start for the next token. > > * When ' or " is found where a token should start, the token will be > the portion of text between that delimiter and its next occurrence. > There is no possibility to escape the delimiter. > The two delimiters are discarded. > > * If any other character is found where a token should start, the > token ends at whitespace. > > * Backslashes get special processing except for tokens that were > delimited by the single quote. > > * inside the same do_meta_command method, when processing the import > command, the name of the table is appended to some queries this way: > > sqlite3_snprintf(nByte+20, zSql, "INSERT INTO %s VALUES(?", zTable); > > So, my .import command was tokenized that way: > > Token 1: file_name.txt > Token 2: Ben's table <--- note: double quotes gone. > > And the SQL query that was forged was incorrect: > > INSERT INTO Ben's table VALUES(?... > > The only way I found in order to have my import succeed was: > > .import 'file_name.txt' "[Ben's table]" > > which I find cumbersome. > > Are there any plans to improve the tokenizer to enable escaping the > delimiter (doubling the single quote or backslash-escaping the double > quote), and to escape the table name in the dot-commands? > > Potential problem: how to use .backup or .restore with a file name that > contains both ' " and space? > > Thanks. > > -- > Benoit Mortgat > _______________________________________________ > sqlite-users mailing list > sqlite-users@sqlite.org > http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users > _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
