CompTIA PenTest+ Practice Test

What character is used as a delimiter in SQL to indicate the end of the string?

1. Comma (,)

2. Semicolon (;)

3. Single quote (')

4. Double quote (")

The correct answer is: Single quote (')

In SQL, the character that is used as a delimiter to indicate the end of a string is the single quote. When defining string literals in SQL queries, values must be enclosed in single quotes to distinguish them from other types of data such as column names or table names. For example, a query like `SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = 'john_doe';` uses single quotes to signify that 'john_doe' is a string value being compared against the username column. While semicolons are indeed used to terminate SQL statements, they are not specific to strings and serve a broader purpose in complete statement termination. The comma is often used to separate multiple items in lists, such as in `SELECT column1, column2 FROM table;`, but does not indicate the end of a string. Double quotes are used in some SQL databases to delimit identifiers, such as table or column names, which may contain special characters, but they do not function as string delimiters in the same way that single quotes do. Thus, using single quotes for string literals is a fundamental aspect of SQL syntax and is essential for performing any operations that involve textual data.