Re: Error in SQL parsing?

[Alex Schroeder]

MFerguson@peinc.com (Mickey Ferguson) writes:

> From what I was told, and then going from memory on top of that, the
> backslash is an escape character for error handling sections, for things
> like \n to produce a newline, stuff like that.  But it's a perfectly valid
> character inside a string.

> I looked at the date/time of sql.el, found in the lisp/progmodes folder, and
> it is Jun 16  1999, and inside the file it says it is version 1.4.5.  Is
> this problem fixed in a newer version?

No, this has not been fixed.  The problem is that when I personally
write SQL, I practically never use backslashes -- unless I have told
the DB explicitly that the backslash shall be used as an escape
character.

If you use C-u C-x = on the escape character in SQL mode, you'll get a
buffer like this:

  character: \ (0134, 92, 0x5c)
      ...
     syntax: escape
      ...

The syntax class is "escape".  The simplest solution would be to make
the backslash never escape -- to make it a normal punctuation
character, in fact.  The complex solution would be to correctly parse
SQL, which I think is overkill.

The simplest solution requires you to put the following in your
~/.emacs file:

(require 'sql)
(add-hook 'sql-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (modify-syntax-entry ?\\ "." sql-mode-syntax-table)))

Once you do this, a SQL buffer with the following statement correctly
ends the string at the second apostrophe:

     select 'foo\' from foo;

Alex.
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