In Snowflake, special characters need to be escaped to avoid ambiguity and ensure that they are interpreted correctly. The escape character in Snowflake is the backslash "\". You can use it to escape special characters in string and identifier literals.
To escape a special character in a string literal, simply prepend it with a backslash. For example, if you want to include a single quote in a string literal, you can escape it like this: 'It\'s a beautiful day'. Similarly, to escape a backslash itself, you can use two backslashes: 'C:\\Program Files\\'.
Escaping special characters in identifier literals is necessary when the identifier contains characters that are not allowed or have special meaning. To escape an identifier, enclose it in double quotes and use a backslash to escape any double quotes within the identifier: "My\"Table". Note that identifier names are case-insensitive in Snowflake.
In addition to the backslash escape character, Snowflake also provides a way to specify raw string literals, which ignore special characters altogether. To specify a raw string literal, prefix it with an "r": r'This is a raw string \n' will output the string as is, with the \n characters not being interpreted as a new line.
Overall, escaping special characters is important in Snowflake to ensure that your queries are executed correctly and without any unintended consequences. By using the backslash escape character, you can include special characters in your queries and identifiers with confidence and avoid any potential issues.