mysqldump not escaping single quotes properly

Question

I use mysqldump to backup my mysql database. The problem is that the sql file generated by mysqldump doesn't escapes single quotes properly.

Here is an example of the mysqldump generated sql script :

INSERT INTO `someTable` VALUES (1,'This ain\'t escaped correctly');

That single quote escaping in "ain't" doesn't work and it makes the rest of the script being inside that string. Is there a way around this?

Answer 1

That output of mysqldump is working as designed, and it is properly escaped, unless you try to restore the dump on a MySQL instance with SQL_MODE=NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES set.

There's an outstanding feature request to make mysqldump use a pair of single-quotes to escape literal single-quotes, as per ANSI SQL. See http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=65941

In the meantime you might be able to convert from backslash-singlequote to pair-of-singlequotes with a command line this:

mysqldump test | sed -e "s/\\\'/''/g" > test-dump.sql

I tried that out briefly by creating a dummy table in my test database and inserting the string "O'Hare" into the table. But that's hardly a comprehensive test -- I take no responsibility for this suggestion working in all cases.