Mysql string input with formatting - php

Question

I am a beginner at MySQL and I am having a little trouble with the correct formatting for a cell in my table.
I have the data type set to TEXT so there is plenty of space for a few small paragraphs within the cell however my problem is, how do I format the paragraph with apostrophes, quotes, colons, and other punctuation that I am inserting into that cell via command line (MAC)?
This is what the column values are:
joke TEXT NOT NULL,
I want to insert this example joke into the table:
Husband says: "When I'm gone you'll never find another man like me".
Wife replied: "What makes you think I'd want another man like you!"
How do I write it into command line so it will display the exact formatting or at least something close. My command line entry looks like this:
INSERT INTO jokes
(date_submitted, source, joke_style, joke)
VALUES
(NOW(), 'www.example.com','Blonde', 'Joke would go here with (: ' ,) and so on.');
Do I escape the apostrophes with \'? What do I do with the rest of the punctuation, and how do I store line breaks?

Answer 1

Use mysql_real_escape_string() or switch to PDO and use PDO::prepare() with placeholders.
Example:
$sth = $pdo->prepare('INSERT INTO jokes ... VALUES (NOW, :joke, ...)');
$sth->execute(array(':joke' => $joke));
If you need to write commands manually, you should escape ' as \', and the newline character is \n. For more details about how strings are escaped in MySQL, see the manual section about string literals.

Answer 2

heres an excerpt from the manual
The following SELECT statements demonstrate how quoting and escaping work:
mysql> SELECT 'hello', '"hello"', '""hello""', 'hel''lo', '\'hello';
+-------+---------+-----------+--------+--------+
| hello | "hello" | ""hello"" | hel'lo | 'hello |
+-------+---------+-----------+--------+--------+
mysql> SELECT "hello", "'hello'", "''hello''", "hel""lo", "\"hello";
+-------+---------+-----------+--------+--------+
| hello | 'hello' | ''hello'' | hel"lo | "hello |
+-------+---------+-----------+--------+--------+
mysql> SELECT 'This\nIs\nFour\nLines';
+--------------------+
| This
Is
Four
Lines |
+--------------------+
mysql> SELECT 'disappearing\ backslash';
+------------------------+
| disappearing backslash |
+------------------------+