| title | Literal Prefixes and Suffixes | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| description | Literal Prefixes and Suffixes | |||
| author | David-Engel | |||
| ms.author | davidengel | |||
| ms.date | 01/19/2017 | |||
| ms.service | sql | |||
| ms.subservice | connectivity | |||
| ms.topic | concept-article | |||
| helpviewer_keywords |
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In a SQL statement, a literal is a character representation of an actual data value. For example, in the following statement, ABC, FFFF, and 10 are literals:
SELECT CharCol, BinaryCol, IntegerCol FROM MyTable
WHERE CharCol = 'ABC' AND BinaryCol = 0xFFFF AND IntegerCol = 10
Literals for some data types require special prefixes and suffixes. In the preceding example, the character literal (ABC) requires a single quotation mark (') as both a prefix and a suffix, the binary literal (FFFF) requires the characters 0x as a prefix, and the integer literal (10) does not require a prefix or suffix.
For all data types except date, time, and timestamps, interoperable applications should use the values returned in the LITERAL_PREFIX and LITERAL_SUFFIX columns in the result set created by SQLGetTypeInfo. For date, time, timestamp, and datetime interval literals, interoperable applications should use the escape sequences discussed in the preceding section.