Hi, This may actually be more of a limitation with the DBD::Pg perl driver. I'm not sure. Basically I'm using DBD::Pg in a perl script which inserts data into a very simple table. The statement I'm using is thus : my($sth) = $dbh->prepare("insert into maintenance (sno, date, data) values ('$sno', '$date', '$tmpstring')"); (all on one line of course...) My problem is this. $tmpstring may well contain embedded newlines or ' characters (these are the two characters I've had problems with so far). I don't want to go down the route of rewriting those characters into something 'unique' and decoding whenever I extract information from the table. That's always struck me as a bit of a kludge. So, is it a problem with postgresql, or DBD::Pg, or (most likely) what I'm doing with them... ? Any help much appreciated. Cheers, Al