ORA-00911: invalid character

The statement contains a character Oracle cannot accept at that point. In practice this is often a curly quote pasted from Word, Outlook or a web page, or an invisible character. Retype the quotes and the part around the error.

What ORA-00911 means

SQL identifiers and punctuation accept a limited set of characters. When the parser meets anything else outside a string literal, it stops with ORA-00911. Text copied from documents is the classic source: the statement looks correct on screen, but ‘ and ’ are not the same as the straight quote '.

Common causes of ORA-00911

Curly quotes or long dashes copied from Word, Outlook, Teams or a web page.
Invisible characters such as a non-breaking space.
An identifier starting with a digit or containing characters like - without double quotes.
Characters from another tool’s syntax, such as a backtick around a name.

How to fix ORA-00911

Retype the quotes by hand instead of pasting them.
Paste the statement into a plain text editor and look at the position the error reports.
Put unusual identifiers in double quotes, or better, rename them.
If your SQL comes from a document, turn off smart quotes there.

ORA-00911 example

Curly quotes look almost the same as straight ones:

-- ORA-00911: invalid character
SELECT ‘a’ FROM dual;

-- Works
SELECT 'a' FROM dual;

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Oracle documentation for ORA-00911. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation. SQLlightspeed is not affiliated with Oracle.