What is '`' character called? - character

I feel silly for asking this but it isn't like I could google this.
What is the ` character called? In case it doesnt show up, it is the character used for inline code with markdown. Also, on most keyboards, it shares the key with ~.
I like all three answers so I made this a CW instead of accepting

All sorts of things, but in programming mostly the back-quote or backtick,

Grave (pronounced Grahv, not like the synonym for tomb) or Grave accent.

From the Jargon file, the prime nerd reference which really should be an ISO standard :-)
Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; ; grave.
Rare: backprime; backspark; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; opening single quotation mark; quasiquote.

You can use Unicode table to find name of the symbol. There are utilities which let you search it, like gucharmap. It gives U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT for this symbol.

This answer or this answer provides a good definition.
In laymen's terms "no-shift-tilde" is also useful in PHP for keeping mySQL statements from crashing on single quotes on the table name.
SELECT * from `the_table_name` WHERE id=1 // best practice
For some reason certain PHP servers will choke on this:
SELECT * from 'the_table_name' WHERE id=1 // not preferred method
This normally works, but doesn't pass nice in strings:
SELECT * from "the_table_name" WHERE id=1 // how to escape this string?
Other than that, I don't use it much.

Related

How to escape '|" character into an org-mode table

I am building some tables in org-mode and I need to enter "||" into the table (for the logical OR command) and nothing I try turns the two characters off as table constructors.
I've tried single quotes, double quotes, backticks and prefacing them with '\'. I've also tried every permutation of using ':=' to get a literal string and they don't work.
// Tony Williams
Depending on what you want to do with the output of the table, you could use alternative unicode characters that look like vertical pipes (or double vertical pipes). Examples:
This is the pipe character written twice (as for logical OR):
||
Those are similar (or not too different) looking unicode characters
‖ - ¦¦ - ❘❘
Of course, this won't work for you if you are not just interested in the looks (but escaping pipes would not work either).
See here more unicode characters you might like better than those 3 above
It turns out that you can use HTML entities in org-mode tables for output via pandoc.
\vert{} doesn't work but I went to the table pointed to by MrSpock and tried the HTML entity and the output when run through pandoc was perfect. || gives me '||'. I also tested a few other HTML entities and they also worked fine.
Well, if the goal is to export your notes, then
$\lvert\mathbb{N}\rvert$
would be an equivalent of
$|\mathbb{N}|$
Character is: \vert
Example: a \vert\ b -> a | b

Replace characters with multi-character strings

I am trying to replace German and Dutch umlauts such as ä, ü, or ß. They should be written like ae instead of ä. So I can't simply translate one char with another.
Is there a more elegant way to do that? Actually it looks like that (not completed yet):
SELECT addr, REPLACE (REPLACE(addr, 'ü','ue'),'ß','ss') FROM search;
On my way trying different commands I got another problem:
When I searched for Ü I got this:
ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xdc27
Tried it with U&'\0220', it didn't replace anything. Only by using ü (for lowercase ü) it was replaced correctly. Has to do something with unicode, but how to solve this issue?
Kind regards from Germany. :)
Your server encoding seems to be UTF8.
I suspect your client_encoding does not match, which might give you a wrong impression of what you are dealing with. Check with:
SHOW client_encoding; -- in your actual session
And read this related answers:
Can not insert German characters in Postgres
Replace unicode characters in PostgreSQL
The rest of the tool chain has to be in sync, too. When using puTTY, for instance, one has to make sure, the terminal agrees with the rest: Change settings... Window -> Translation -> Remote character set = UTF-8.
As for your first question, you already have the best solution. A couple of umlauts are best replaced with a string of replace() statements.
As you seem to know already as well, single character replacements are more efficient with (a single) translate() statement.
Related:
Replace unicode characters in PostgreSQL
Regex remove all occurrences of multiple characters in a string
Beside other reasons I decided to write the replacement in python. Like Erwin wrote before, it seems there is no better solution as combining replace- commands.
In general pretty simple, even no encoding had to benn used. My "final" solution now looks like this:
ger_UE="Ü"
ger_AE="Ä"
ger_OE="Ö"
ger_SS="ß"
dk_AA="Å"
dk_OE="Ø"
dk_AE="Æ"
cur.execute("""Select addr, REPLACE (REPLACE (REPLACE( REPLACE (REPLACE (REPLACE (REPLACE(addr, '%s','UE'),'%s','OE'),'%s','AE'),'%s','SS'),'%s','AA'),'%s','OE'),'%s','AE')
from search WHERE x = '1';"""%(ger_UE,ger_OE,ger_AE,ger_SS,dk_AA,dk_OE,dk_AE))
I am now looking forward to the speed when it hits the large table. If anyone would like to make some annotations, they are very welcome.

Regular expression to prevent SQL injection

I know I have to escape single quotes, but I was just wondering if there's any other character, or text string I should guard against
I'm working with mysql and h2 database...
If you check the MySQL function mysql-real-escape-string which is used by all upper level languages you'll see that the strange characters list is quite huge:
\
'
"
NUL (ASCII 0)
\n
\r
Control+Z
The upper language wrappers like the PHP one may also protect the strings from malformed unicode characters which may end up as a quote.
The conclusion is: do not escape strings, especially with hard-to-debug hard-to-read, hard-to-understand regular expressions. Use the built-in provided functions or use parameterized SQL queries (where all parameters cannot contain anything interpredted as SQL by the engine). This is also stated in h2 documentation: h2 db sql injection protection.
A simple solution for the problem above is to use a prepared statement:
This will somewhat depend on what type of information you need to obtain from the user. If you are only looking for simple text, then you might as well ignore all special characters that a user might input (if it's not too much trouble)--why allow the user to input characters that don't make sense in your query?
Some languages have functions that will take care of this for you. For example, PHP has the mysql_real_escape_string() function (http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-real-escape-string.php).
You are correct that single quotes (') are user input no-no's; but double quotes (") and backslashes (\) should also definitely be ignored (see the above link for which characters the PHP function ignores, since those are the most important and basic ones).
Hope this is at least a good start!

Whats an alternative to having to use sqlite prepared statements to escape characters

I'm working on an iPhone app, which uses the SQLite database, and I'm trying to handle escape characters. I know that there is LIKE ESCAPE to handle escape characters in select statements, but in my application i have SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE actions and i really don't know how to go about handling escape characters.
if you are using sqlite3_exec() all-in-one function,
you dont need to use sqlite3_bind* functions..
just pass the string to sqlite3_mprintf() with %q token
sqlite3_mprintf("%q","it's example");
and the output string is
it''s example
Use FMDB, and then you won't have to. It has built-in parameter binding support, and that will take care of any escaping you need for you.
I believe you simply have to tell SQLite what your escape character is at the end of the SQL statement. For example:
SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE RevenueChange LIKE '%0\%' ESCAPE '\'
The LIKE will match values such as 30%, 140%, etc. The character I used, \, could be anything.

Japanese COBOL Code: rules for G literals and identifiers?

We are processing IBMEnterprise Japanese COBOL source code.
The rules that describe exactly what is allowed in G type literals,
and what are allowed for identifiers are unclear.
The IBM manual indicates that a G'....' literal
must have a SHIFT-OUT as the first character inside the quotes,
and a SHIFT-IN as the last character before the closing quote.
Our COBOL lexer "knows" this, but objects to G literals
found in real code. Conclusion: the IBM manual is wrong,
or we are misreading it. The customer won't let us see the code,
so it is pretty difficult to diagnose the problem.
EDIT: Revised/extended below text for clarity:
Does anyone know the exact rules of G literal formation,
and how they (don't) match what the IBM reference manuals say?
The ideal answer would a be regular expression for the G literal.
This is what we are using now (coded by another author, sigh):
#token non_numeric_literal_quote_g [STRING]
"<G><squote><ShiftOut> (
(<NotLineOrParagraphSeparatorNorShiftInNorShiftOut>|<squote><squote>|<ShiftOut>)
(<NotLineOrParagraphSeparator>|<squote><squote>)
| <ShiftIn> ( <NotLineOrParagraphSeparatorNorApostropheNorShiftInNorShiftOut>|
<ShiftIn>|<ShiftOut>)
| <squote><squote>
)* <ShiftIn><squote>"
where <name> is a macro that is another regular expression. Presumably they
are named well enough so you can guess what they contain.
Here is the IBM Enterprise COBOL Reference.
Chapter 3 "Character Strings", subheading "DBCS literals" page 32 is relevant reading.
I'm hoping that by providing the exact reference, an experienced IBMer can tell us how we misread it :-{ I'm particularly unclear on what the phrase "DBCS-characters" means
when it says "one or more characters in the range X'00...X'FF for either byte"
How can DBCS-characters be anything but pairs of 8-bit character codes?
The existing RE matches 3 types of pairs of characters if you examine it.
One answer below suggests that the <squote><squote> pairing is wrong.
OK, I might believe that, but that means the RE would only reject
literal strings containing single <squote>s. I don't believe that's
the problem we are having as we seem to trip over every instance of a G literal.
Similarly, COBOL identifiers can apparantly be composed
with DBCS characters. What is allowed for an identifier, exactly?
Again a regular expression would be ideal.
EDIT2: I'm beginning to think the problem might not be the RE.
We are reading Shift-JIS encoded text. Our reader converts that
text to Unicode as it goes. But DBCS characters are really
not Shift-JIS; rather, they are binary-coded data. Likely
what is happening is the that DBCS data is getting translated
as if it were Shift-JIS, and that would muck up the ability
to recognize "two bytes" as a DBCS element. For instance,
if a DBCS character pair were :81 :1F, a ShiftJIS reader
would convert this pair into a single Unicode character,
and its two-byte nature is then lost. If you can't count pairs,
you can't find the end quote. If you can't find the end quote,
you can't recognize the literal. So the problem would appear
to be that we need to switch input-encoding modes in the middle
of the lexing process. Yuk.
Try to add a single quote in your rule to see if it passes by making this change,
<squote><squote> => <squote>{1,2}
If I remember it correctly, one difference between N and G literals is that G allows single quote. Your regular expression doesn't allow that.
EDIT: I thought you got all other DBCS literals working and just having issues with G-string so I just pointed out the difference between N and G. Now I took a closer look at your RE. It has problems. In the Cobol I used, you can mix ASCII with Japanese, for example,
G"ABC<ヲァィ>" <> are Shift-out/shift-in
You RE assumes the DBCS only. I would loose this restriction and try again.
I don't think it's possible to handle G literals entirely in regular expression. There is no way to keep track of matching quotes and SO/SI with a finite state machine alone. Your RE is so complicated because it's trying to do the impossible. I would just simplify it and take care of mismatching tokens manually.
You could also face encoding issues. The code could be in EBCDIC (Katakana) or UTF-16, treating it as ASCII will not work. SO/SI sometimes are converted to 0x1E/0x1F on Windows.
I am just trying to help you shoot in the dark without seeing the actual code :)
Does <NotLineOrParagraphSeparatorNorApostropheNorShiftInNorShiftOut> also include single and double quotation marks, or just apostrophes? That would be a problem, as it would consume the literal closing character sequence >' ...
I would check the definition of all other macros to make sure. The only obvious problem that I can see is the <squote><squote> that you already seem to be aware of.