Informix Error -282

Reasons / Common Causes

-282 is a direct punctuation error: a quote character without its matching close. The official guidance also demonstrates a genuinely useful technique for a related problem — how to embed a quote character inside a literal without triggering this error.

1. A missing closing (or opening) quote in a string literal — the direct, most common cause.
2. Attempting to embed a quote character inside a string delimited by the same quote type, without using the correct technique — a stray, unescaped quote character inside a same-delimited string reads as an early close, leaving the rest of the intended string unmatched.
3. Confusion between single-quote string literals and double-quote delimited identifiers — especially relevant if DELIMIDENT is set (see -201), where double quotes take on a different meaning entirely.

Solutions / Resolution

1. Inspect the statement's quote punctuation carefully, per the official guidance.
2. To include a quote character inside a literal, switch delimiter type rather than trying to escape it awkwardly. The official example demonstrates this directly:

   SELECT '"', fname, '"', "''", lname, "''" FROM customer;
   

   Here, '"' is a single-quote-delimited string containing one literal double-quote character, and "''" is a double-quote-delimited string containing two literal apostrophe characters — each uses the other quote type as the delimiter specifically so the embedded character doesn't need escaping.

Examples

The direct cause: a missing closing quote

SELECT * FROM customer WHERE name = 'Jane Doe;
-- -282: the opening quote before "Jane Doe" has no matching close

Fix:

SELECT * FROM customer WHERE name = 'Jane Doe';

Embedding a literal apostrophe using the delimiter-switch technique

-- Want to select the literal text: O'Brien
SELECT "O'Brien" FROM customer;
-- using double quotes as the delimiter avoids needing to escape
-- the apostrophe inside the string

The official example, explained

SELECT '"', fname, '"', "''", lname, "''" FROM customer;

This produces, for each row: a literal double-quote, the value of fname, another literal double-quote, two literal apostrophes, the value of lname, and two more literal apostrophes — useful for building a specific quoted/delimited output format directly in the select list.

Diagnostic Checks

1. Count quote characters in the statement to find a mismatched pair.
2. Check for an attempt to embed a quote character without switching to the other delimiter type.

Related Errors / Related Topics

• -201 — "A syntax error has occurred." The general punctuation-error family this belongs to.
• -280 — "A quoted string exceeds 256 bytes." Another quote-related condition, often caused by the same class of missing-quote mistake merging two strings together.

To embed a quote character inside a literal, switch to the other quote type as the delimiter — that's the standard technique, not escaping the character in place.