Inserting values into a table with '&'

I often say "I learn something new about Oracle every day". It really is true - there is so much to know about it, it is hard to keep up sometimes.
It is a little sqlplus quirk that I probably knew at one point but totally forgot. People run into problems with &'s in sqlplus all of the time as sqlplus tries to substitute in for an &variable. So, if they try to select '&hello world' from dual - they'll get:
SQL> select '&hello world' from dual;
Enter value for hello:
old 1: select '&hello world' from dual
new 1: select ' world' from dual

'WORLD
------
world

As the result.
One solution is to "set define off" to disable the substitution (or set define to some other character). Another oft quoted solution is to use chr(38) -
SQL> select chr(38)||'hello world' from dual;
I never liked that one personally. lol :)
What i suggest is this
SQL> select '&' || 'hello world' from dual;

'&'||'HELLOW

------------

&hello world

SQL>

Well just concatenate '&' to the string, sqlplus doesn't touch that one! I like that better than chr(38) (but a little less than set define off....) ... there u have it. Smile

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