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SQL Server FAQ - Writing Character String Constants or Literals

By: FYIcenter.com

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How To Write Character String Constants or Literals?

Character string literals are used everywhere in Transact-SQL statements. You need to learn some important rules on writing character string literals:

• Character string literals must be enclosed in single quotes as 'Welcome to FYIcenter.com!'.
• An empty string must be expressed as ''.
• Single quote characters inside a string must be expressed as two single quotes. For example: 'It''s Sunday!'.
• Character strings use non-default character code pages must use the COLLATE clause to provide the code page through a collate name. For example, 'Français' COLLATE French_CI_AS.

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1. What Is a Constant or Literal?
2. How To Write Character String Constants or Literals?
3. What Is a Collation?
4. How To Specify the Collation for a Character Data Type?
5. What Happens If Strings Are Casted into Wrong Code Pages?
6. How To Find Out What Is the Default Collation in a Database?
7. How Fixed Length Strings Are Truncated and Padded?
8. How To Enter Unicode Character String Literals?
9. How To Enter Binary String Literals?
10. How To Enter Date and Time Literals?
11. Why I Can Not Enter 0.001 Second in Date and Time Literals?
12. What Happens If Date-Only Values Are Provided as Date and Time Literals?
13. What Happens If Time-Only Values Are Provided as Date and Time Literals?
14. What Are Out-of-Range Errors with Date and Time Literals?
15. What Happens If an Integer Is Too Big for INT Date Type?
16. How Extra Digits Are Handled with NUMERIC Data Type Literals?
17. How REAL and FLOAT Literal Values Are Rounded?
18. What Are the Underflow and Overflow Behaviors on FLOAT Literals?