Valid literals

Values and definitions of valid literals.

Valid literal consist of these kinds of values:

  • blob

    hexadecimal defined as 0[xX](hex)+

  • boolean

    true or false, case-insensitive, not enclosed in quotation marks

  • numeric constant

    A numeric constant can consist of integers 0-9 and a minus sign prefix. A numeric constant can also be float. A float can be a series of one or more decimal digits, followed by a period, ., and one or more decimal digits. There is no optional + sign. The forms .42 and 42 are unacceptable. You can use leading or trailing zeros before and after decimal points. For example, 0.42 and 42.0. A float constant, expressed in E notation, consists of the characters in this regular expression: 

    '-'?[0-9]+('.'[0-9]*)?([eE][+-]?[0-9+])?

    NaN and Infinity are floats.

  • identifier

    Names of tables, columns, types, and other objects are identifiers. Since keyspace and table names are used in system file names, they must start with a letter or number and can only contain alphanumeric characters and underscores. All other identifiers, such as column and user-defined function names can contain any character. To specify an identifier that contains a special character enclose the name in quotes.

  • integer

    An optional minus sign, -, followed by one or more digits.

  • string literal

    Characters enclosed in single quotation marks. To use a single quotation mark itself in a string literal, escape it using a single quotation mark. For example, use ''to make dog possessive: dog''s.

  • uuid

    32 hex digits, 0-9 or a-f, which are case-insensitive, separated by dashes, -, after the 8th, 12th, 16th, and 20th digits. For example: 01234567-0123-0123-0123-0123456789ab

  • timeuuid

    Uses the time in 100 nanosecond intervals since 00:00:00.00 UTC (60 bits), a clock sequence number for prevention of duplicates (14 bits), plus the IEEE 801 MAC address (48 bits) to generate a unique identifier. For example: d2177dd0-eaa2-11de-a572-001b779c76e3

  • whitespace

    Separates terms and used inside string literals, but otherwise CQL ignores whitespace.