SQL - Escaping a Parentheses Character When Setting Column Name

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#1

I’m doing the SQL CIA World Facebook project and came across this small issue. This is the step where it asks to display which countries have a higher death rate than birth rate.

This code works fine:

%%sql
  SELECT name, ROUND((birth_rate - death_rate), 2) AS net_growth_rate
    FROM facts
   WHERE death_rate > birth_rate
ORDER BY net_growth_rate;

Then I thought of setting the net_growth_rate column title to net_growth_rate(birth minus death) just to make it more clear but I got an error which I assume is due to the parentheses characters.

I tried googling how to “escape” the parentheses characters and came across suggestions like ticks, single quotes, backslashes, brackets. None of those seem to be working for me so I am assuming I am doing something wrong.

Not a huge deal by leaving it as net_growth_rate but thought I’d ask in case it comes up again.

Thanks for your time!

#2

Using a string to define a column name

AS "net_growth_rate(birth minus death)"

OR

Using CONCAT to format the column name.

AS CONCAT('net_growth_rate', '(birth minus death)')

Why make column too difficult to reference

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#3

Thanks for replying. Neither of those are working for me. Maybe it’s something to do with the way it’s set up in Jupyter?

But you make a great point adding the parentheses would make it more difficult to reference, I’ll leave it as is then.

Thanks again!

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