Apostrophe Delimiter In the MySQL version of SQL, you signal the beginning and the end of a string with either single quotes or double quotes. Both of the following examples are valid: INSERT INTO COMPANY_TABLE (company_name) VALUES ‘The Fish Shack’; INSERT INTO COMPANY_TABLE (company_name) VALUES “The Fish Shack”; The following example, however, creates an error: INSERT INTO COMPANY_TABLE (tag_line) VALUES ‘Eat at Joe’s -- It’s Good Food!’; SQL wants to interpret the string as "‘Eat at Joe’," with everything following the second apostrophe as erroneous. The following text does not fix the problem: INSERT INTO COMPANY_TABLE (tag_line) VALUES “Eat at Joe’s -- It’s Good Food!”; This would work if the text had only one apostrophe between the double quotes, but this text has two. Also, because some Web-page programming languages use double quotes themselves, you may wish to avoid using them in your SQL.