Managing escape character for an external table in Azure Synapse Analytics - azure-synapse

Question

I've an ADF pipeline that reads a SAP table and then writes to an ADLS gen2 sink in csv format.
The SAP table has an address field having the comma character (",") between the street
andthe house number: this comma is a character to consider and it isn't a column delimiter.
So, in ADF for the sink data set I've:
column delimiter = comma;
row delimiter = default;
encoding = default (UTF-8);
escape character = backslash;
quote character = no quote character.
Inside Synapse Analytics (SQL servless pool), in order to create a related external table
from the corresponding ADLS gen2 csv it was created an external file format with these options:
format type = DELIMITEDTEXT;
format options = (FIELD_TERMINATOR = N',', USE_TYPE_DEFAULT = False).
Viewing the data in the SQL external table the data next the address are wrong
because the escape character was bad interpreted: the backslash was interpreted
as a field terminator.
Now, any suggests to me to solve a such issue? Thanks

Answer 1

Unfortunately, you can't specify escape characters for external tables in Synapse SQL.
It is not supported for now.
There are 2 ways to achieve your scenario:
1. Change how files are generated from ADF
By adding quote character " you can omit the escape character from the ADF.
This way serverless SQL pool will be able to read your files.
ADF configuration:
column delimiter = comma;
row delimiter = default;
encoding = default (UTF-8);
escape character = no escape character;
quote character = "
2. Use OPENROWSET
This scenario can be achieved with OPENROWSET.
Here is an example of it:
SELECT *
FROM OPENROWSET(
BULK 'path',
FORMAT = 'CSV',
PARSER_VERSION = '2.0',
FIELDTERMINATOR =',',
ESCAPECHAR = '\\'
) AS [r];
You can specify escape character this way: ESCAPECHAR = '\\'
Reference in docs Query CSV files - Escape characters
You can create a new feature request and the team will triage it accordingly.
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