How to escape strings in SQL Server using PHP

Question

I'm looking for the alternative of mysql_real_escape_string() for SQL Server. Is addslashes() my best option or there is another alternative function that can be used?

An alternative for mysql_error() would also be useful.

Answer 1

Hello @kartik,

addslashes() isn't fully adequate, but PHP's mssql package doesn't provide any decent alternative. The ugly but fully general solution is encoding the data as a hex bytestring, i.e.

$unpacked = unpack('H*hex', $data);
mssql_query('
    INSERT INTO sometable (somecolumn)
    VALUES (0x' . $unpacked['hex'] . ')
');

Abstracted, that would be:

function mssql_escape($data) {
    if(is_numeric($data))
        return $data;
    $unpacked = unpack('H*hex', $data);
    return '0x' . $unpacked['hex'];
}

mssql_query('
    INSERT INTO sometable (somecolumn)
    VALUES (' . mssql_escape($somevalue) . ')
');

mysql_error() equivalent is mssql_get_last_message().

Hope it helps!!
Thank you!!

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