Special Characters

Certain characters have special meanings in SAQL.

Character	Name	Description
`;`	Semicolon	Used to terminate statements.
`'`	Single quote	Used to quote identifiers.
`"`	Double quote	Used to quote strings.
`()`	Parentheses	Used for function calls, to enforce precedence, for order clauses, and to group expressions. Parentheses are mandatory when you’re defining more than one group or order field.
`[]`	Brackets	Used to denote arrays. For example, this is an array of strings: `[ "this", "is", "a", "string", "array" ]` Also used for referencing a particular member of an object. For example, `em['miles']`, which is the same as `em.miles`.
`.`	Period	Used for referencing a particular member of an object. For example, `em.miles`, which is the same as `em['miles']`.
`::`	Two colons	Used to explicitly specify the dataset that a measure or dimension belongs to, by placing it between a dataset name and a column name. Using two colons is the same as using a period (.) between names. For example: `data = foreach data generate left::airline as airline`
`..`	Two periods	Used to separate a range of values. For example: `c = filter b by "the_date" in ["2011-01-01".."2011-01-31"];`