How to escape back ticks

MySQL requires tables that shadow reserved words to be back ticked. I have a table Role which is a reserved word, but I have already put my query in back ticks so I can write it over multiple lines (this is a toy query, large ones will not fit on one line).

How do I escape the back ticks?

Here is my code:

dbmap := db.InitDb()

var roles []entities.Role
query :=
	` << Difficult to see with SO's code editor widget, but here is a back tick
SELECT *
FROM `Role` <<< Needs escaping
`  << Difficult to see, but here is a back tick

_, err := dbmap.Select(&roles, query, nil)
if err != nil {
	panic(err)
}

fmt.Println(roles)

You cannot escape backticks inside backticks, but you can do:

dbmap := db.InitDb()

var roles []entities.Role
query := `
SELECT *
FROM ` + "`Role`"

_, err := dbmap.Select(&roles, query, nil)
if err != nil {
    panic(err)
}

fmt.Println(roles)

If your query is long, it might be worth putting in a text file and reading it in, that will keep your code more concise and organized, and also avoid the backtick quoting issue entirely.

You can use . prefix:

query := `
SELECT *
FROM .Role
`

I just used a placeholder (like the unicode ” or basically anything which won't appear anywhere else in the query) instead of the backticks and replaced them afterwards:

strings.ReplaceAll(`CREATE TABLE ”mydatabase”.”mytable” (
    ”id” binary(16),
    ”sname” varchar(45),
    PRIMARY KEY(”id”)
)`, "”", "`")

(Thanks to Andrey Tarantsov for proposing ” as a placeholder.)

You can try writing queries like this:

query :=fmt.Sprintf("SELECT * FROM `Role`")

You can compare the outputs:

import "fmt"

func main() {
 query :=fmt.Sprintf("SELECT * FROM `Role`")
 fmt.Println(query)
 fmt.Println( `SELECT * FROM ` + "`Role`") }

Use notepad++ on your plain text and replace (search and) replace

`

with

`+"`"+`

If you are using Go Templates you can pass the backtick in as a parameter:

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"text/template"
	"bytes"
)

func main() {
	template,_ := template.New( "greeting").Parse(`Hello {{ .BT }}{{ .FirstName }}{{ .BT }}`)
	data := struct {
	    FirstName string
	    BT        string
	}{
	    FirstName:"bob",
	    BT:"`", // <---- Here!
	}
	var buf bytes.Buffer
	_ = template.Execute(&buf, data)
	fmt.Print(buf.String())
}

gives:

 Hello `bob`