How to avoid variable substitution in Oracle SQL Developer with 'trinidad & tobago'

Question

When I try to execute this statement in Oracle SQL Developer 2.1 a dialog box "Enter Substitution Variable" pops up asking for a replacement value for TOBAGO,

update t set country = 'Trinidad and Tobago' where country = 'trinidad & tobago';

How can I avoid this without resorting to chr(38) or u'trinidad \0026 tobago' which both obscure the purpose of the statement?

Answer 1

Call this before the query:

set define off;

Alternatively, hacky:

update t set country = 'Trinidad and Tobago' where country = 'trinidad &' || ' tobago';

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From Tuning SQL*Plus:

SET DEFINE OFF disables the parsing of commands to replace substitution variables with their values.

Answer 2

In SQL*Plus putting SET DEFINE ? at the top of the script will normally solve this. Might work for Oracle SQL Developer as well.

Answer 3

this will work as you asked without CHAR(38):

update t set country = 'Trinidad and Tobago' where country = 'trinidad & '|| 'tobago';

create table table99(col1 varchar(40));
insert into table99 values('Trinidad &' || '  Tobago');
insert into table99 values('Trinidad &' || '  Tobago');
insert into table99 values('Trinidad &' || '  Tobago');
insert into table99 values('Trinidad &' || '  Tobago');
SELECT * FROM table99;

update table99 set col1 = 'Trinidad and Tobago' where col1 = 'Trinidad &'||'  Tobago';

Answer 4

set scan off; Above command also works.

Answer 5

I was having some issue around this too. Something was starting up everytime I tried to setup a connection to any DB..

What worked for me was removing any startup script that you might have configured!

i.e. Tools>Preferences...>Database and remove any file path that you have in the text box labeled "Filename for connection startup script"!