PostgreSQL queries containing, for example, single quotes or semicolons need to be escaped.

This won’t work:

UPDATE jobs SET work=':'';

To make it work, escape the strings using C-style escapes (E’’) and replacing single-quotes with ‘’:

UPDATE jobs SET work=E':''';

See section “4.1.2.2. String Constants with C-style Escapes” in the PostgreSQL documentation https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/sql-syntax-lexical.html for details.

Thinking about escaping and sanitizing input and output? Read this: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/95325/input-sanitization-vs-output-sanitization

Rules:

• Always sanitize output

By sanitizing the output, you can fix issues caused by bugs in the input sanitizer without touching the database.

• Sanitize input, if it makes sense:

For example, if there’s a risk that input becomes invalid after sanitization then it’s better to store the data raw.

This is also a good idea, if there are multiple output formats and sanitizing the input might break something.