>A while back, when getting into WebConnect, I found liberal use of square brackets where I had expected to see quotes (single or double). I knew these substituted nicely for parentheses in array coding but was totally surprised by this other usage.
>
>I've played around with these a bit and find them (square brackets) equivalent to quotes of either variety.
>
>Is this a correct conclusion?. . . Is this documented somewhere (a search of MSDN (July 2000) and Hacker's revealed virtually nothing)? . . . Are there things to watch out for?

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Most of the time I will use double quotes, but I almost always use square brackets when I have to use quotes (single or double) in the string to improve readness (sp?). For example, I feel that:

cSQLString = "SELECT * FROM Table WHERE field = 'Something'"

is harder to read/less obvious than:

cSQLString = [SELECT * FROM Table WHERE field = 'Something']

Likewise, I prefer to write STRTRAN(m.cVar, ['], ['']) rather than STRTRAN(m.cVar, "'", "''").

It also sometimes make it more obvious what is in the string and what is used to build the string.

cSQLString = [SELECT * FROM Table WHERE field = '] + STRTRAN(m.cVar, ['], ['']) + [']
cSQLString = "SELECT * FROM Table WHERE field = '" + STRTRAN(m.cVar, "'", "''") + "'"

Anytime I build a string that is to be sent to SQLServer, I use the square brackets since I often have to use single quotes like in my first example. Even when I don't have a need for single quotes, I will still use brackets for SQL strings for consistency.

As for things to watch out for, I never found any problem in using square brackets. But, like I said, most of the time I use the double quotes.