How do I escape double quotes in attributes in an XML String in T-SQL?

Question

Pretty simple question - I have an attribute that I would like to have double quotes in. How do I escape them? I've tried

• \"
• ""
• \\"

And I've made the @xml variable both xml type and varchar(max) for all of them.

 declare @xml xml --(or varchar(max) tried both)

 set @xml = '<transaction><item value="hi "mom" lol" 
    ItemId="106"  ItemType="2"  instanceId="215923801"  dataSetId="1" /></transaction>'

 declare @xh int
 exec sp_xml_preparedocument @xh OUTPUT, @xml

 insert into @commits --I declare the table, just removed it for brevity
 select
    x.*
 from openxml(@xh,'/transaction/item')
  WITH (
    dataItemId int,
     dataItemType int,
    instanceId int,
    dataSetId int,
    value varchar(max)
  ) x

Solution 1

Wouldn't that be " in xml? i.e.

"hi "mom" lol" 

**edit: ** tested; works fine:

declare @xml xml

 set @xml = '<transaction><item value="hi &quot;mom&quot; lol" 
    ItemId="106"  ItemType="2"  instanceId="215923801"  dataSetId="1" /></transaction>'

select @xml.value('(//item/@value)[1]','varchar(50)')

Solution 2

Cannot comment anymore but voted it up and wanted to let folks know that " works very well for the xml config files when forming regex expressions for RegexTransformer in Solr like so: regex=".*img src="(.*)".*" using the escaped version instead of double-quotes.

Solution 3

tSql escapes a double quote with another double quote. So if you wanted it to be part of your sql string literal you would do this:

declare @xml xml 
set @xml = "<transaction><item value=""hi"" /></transaction>"

If you want to include a quote inside a value in the xml itself, you use an entity, which would look like this:

declare @xml xml
set @xml = "<transaction><item value=""hi &quot;mom&quot; lol"" /></transaction>"

Solution 4

In Jelly.core to test a literal string one would use:

<core:when test="${ name == 'ABC' }"> 

But if I have to check for string "Toy's R Us":

<core:when test="${ name == "Toy's R Us" }">

It would be like this, if the double quotes were allowed inside:

<core:when test="${ name == "Toy's R Us" }"> 

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Comments

[Marc Gravell]

By the way... there is no reason (AFAIK) to use openxml here... that is "pre-2005" stuff. If you have an xml value, use it as xml directly.

[Adam]

Marc - Thank you. I had another bug that ended up being openxml was busting with curly apostrophes: ’ I think I'm going to post it as a question/answer for google to find.

[Amit Patil]

Best not to use double-quotes as SQL string delimiters though. Single quotes are ANSI standard and always work, regardless of the QUOTED_IDENTIFIER setting.

[Joel Coehoorn]

Agreed, but I wanted to demonstrate that's it's possible, just in case there was any confusion about what he was trying to do.