Incorrect syntax near ''

Panagiotis Kanavos is right, sometimes copy and paste T-SQL can make appear unwanted characters...

I finally found a simple and fast way (only Notepad++ needed) to detect which character is wrong, without having to manually rewrite the whole statement: there is no need to save any file to disk.

It's pretty quick, in Notepad++:

  • Click "New file"
  • Check under the menu "Encoding": the value should be "Encode in UTF-8"; set it if it's not
  • Paste your text enter image description here
  • From Encoding menu, now click "Encode in ANSI" and check again your text enter image description here

You should easily find the wrong character(s)


The error for me was that I read the SQL statement from a text file, and the text file was saved in the UTF-8 with BOM (byte order mark) format.

To solve this, I opened the file in Notepad++ and under Encoding, chose UTF-8. Alternatively you can remove the first three bytes of the file with a hex editor.


Such unexpected problems can appear when you copy the code from a web page or email and the text contains unprintable characters like individual CR or LF and non-breaking spaces.

Tags:

Sql

Sql Server

Ssms

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