Cannot use question mark as prepared statement placeholder?

I am converting an existing project from MySQL to Postgres. There are quite a few raw SQL literals in the code that use ? as a placeholder, e.g.

  SELECT
    id
  FROM
    users
  WHERE
    name = ?

But I get this error:

DB query error: error: operator does not exist: character varying = ?

I don’t want to convert all my existing SQL from ? to postgres-style operators like $1. Is there some way of having node-postgres accept the question marks instead, or a utility that can convert to postgres style params?

[charmander]

Whats the expected output?

'shouldn''t', if you’re escaping, but again: don’t. It’s a terrible idea. Use parameters. You don’t have to write them manually: https://gist.github.com/charmander/8f7b05f8d2b2e4e3c190c7a9e1bec1f2

Aside: a properly fair comparison would be:

query(`SELECT $1, $2, $3`, [1, 2, 3]);

I can easily see the latter scenario happening as part of crappy refactoring of the codebase.

Solution: don’t do that.

[charmander]

@gajus MySQL’s string escaping is non-standard and won’t work with PostgreSQL:

> console.log(SqlString.format("?", "shouldn't"));
'shouldn\'t'

The entire sqlstring approach is a bad one in the first place, though. Use real parameters, please.