selecting from a FGDB where the item has apostrophes

Question

I am trying to perform a SearchCursor or alternatively a SelectLayerByAttribute where the data will sometimes contain special characters, like apostrophes, dashes, and slashes.

I'm trying to figure out how to make the apostrophes work in my query. 
eg. featureclass = r"C:\my feature class"
qry = "Item_Name = 'John's Cabin' "
arcpy.SearchCursor(featureclass, qry)

that of course doesn't work. But I've tried a few different things, and none works. 
I've tried: 
qry = "John\'s Cabin"; John''s Cabin and neither work. Any other suggestions?

DavidTillberg_community · Answer

Issue is that SQL query syntax needs to escape single quote, which is done by using two single quotes:

' (in John's) needs to become '' in SQL syntax

I think easiest way is to split out the search term into a variable:

qry_item_value = "John's Cabin"

qry_item_value_fixed = qry_item_value.replace("'", "''")

qry = "Item_Name = '%s'" % qry_item_value_fixed

JoshuaChan · Answer

OK. my mistake, human error caused most of the problems.

In case anyone's interested this code works: # fixing FN name if apostrophe exists
if string.find(fn_name, "'") <> -1:
    print 'fixing apostrophe in', fn_name, 'to be queryable.'
    fn_name_qry = string.replace(fn_name, "'", "''")
    print fn_name_qry
else: 
    fn_name_qry = fn_name

cad_qry = cad_itm + ' = \'' + fn_name_qry + '\''

that results in an fn_name looking like  Lil''wat First Nation
and the double-single quotes is interpreted OK by ArcMap.

thanks everyone.

JoshuaChan · Answer

OK, so here's my example, with the real field name and value: 
[HTML]arcpy.SelectLayerByAttribute_management(lyr, "NEW_SELECTION", """CONTACT_ORG"" = 'Lil''wat First Nation'")[/HTML]

I got an error in PythonWin compiler saying: Failed to check - syntax error - EOF while scanning triple-quoted string literal

did I put one too many double quotes?

arcMap will bomb if it sees this : "ITEM" = 'Lil''wat First Nation'  because I think it stops at 'Lil'

I t didn't work because there was an error in the first line suggested.  It should have been:qry = """Item_Name"" = 'John''s Cabin' "

The two single quotes together are SQL specific, not Python specific and that is how you include a single quote in an SQL query.  (Done it many times with an FGDB).