I’m adding some small features to the API for joind.in when I have a moment and this is my first experience of working with CodeIgniter. I’ve been getting increasingly impatient with its tendency to try to escape my SQL code for me – this is a really useful default feature but it seems to assume I don’t know what I’m doing and so it puts backticks all over perfectly acceptable SQL code, very annoying!

One night when I was getting exasperated with it tangling up my SQL expressions, I tweeted my frustration in the hope that I was just missing something simple. A prompt reply from @damiangostomski told me that this was indeed the case … I dug around for the API docs on codeigniter – it’s an established framework and has a good reputation. I knew it would have API docs even though I hadn’t used the framework before, and I found them:

$this->db->select() accepts an optional second parameter. If you set it to FALSE, CodeIgniter will not try to protect your field or table names with backticks. This is useful if you need a compound select statement.

That quote is from this API docs page – so a big thankyou to Damian for replying to me on twitter, and to the good people at codeigniter for adding a useful option to their framework and documenting it so nicely :)