I discovered today, to my horror, that Postgres accepts newline characters inside single- and double-quoted string literals:

postgres=# select 'a
postgres'# b';
┌──────────┐
│ ?column? │
├──────────┤
│ a       ↵│
│ b        │
└──────────┘
(1 row)

This lead to a really confusing syntax error today in a query with a typo:

  SELECT "updateFields"->>'enumTypeName"
  FROM input
  ...

I wish Postgres would report a syntax error at the end of the line after 'enumTypeName" instead of in a random location way down in the query...is there any way to turn off tolerating newlines inside non-$$-quoted string literals? It does more harm than good.

I discovered today, to my horror, that Postgres accepts newline characters inside single- and double-quoted string literals:

postgres=# select 'a
postgres'# b';
┌──────────┐
│ ?column? │
├──────────┤
│ a       ↵│
│ b        │
└──────────┘
(1 row)

This lead to a really confusing syntax error today in a query with a typo:

  SELECT "updateFields"->>'enumTypeName"
  FROM input
  ...

I wish Postgres would report a syntax error at the end of the line after 'enumTypeName" instead of in a random location way down in the query...is there any way to turn off tolerating newlines inside non-$$-quoted string literals? It does more harm than good.

• postgresql
• syntax-error
• newline
• string-literals

• 3 The answer is no. – Adrian Klaver Commented Feb 4 at 22:22
• Why would that be an error? – Frank Heikens Commented Feb 4 at 23:27
• Most programming languages I’ve worked with don’t allow newlines in string literals, so I didn’t anticipate that SQL is like this. It’s fine when you’re writing code in an IDE with syntax checking, but pretty painful when your dynamically generated query has a syntax error that’s hard to locate – Andy Commented Feb 6 at 15:54
• If you’re very used to SQL you probably take it for granted. If you’re not it seems very questionable. I’ve been writing SQL for half a dozen years without realizing this – Andy Commented Feb 6 at 15:57

1 Answer 1

There is not a possibility in standard Postgres. But you can write a own extension and assign it to post analyze hook, and proposed check can be implemented there.

I don't know any database, that disallow new line in the string.