I have a small Access 2007 database that I need to be able to import data from an existing spreadsheet and put it into our new relational model. For the most part this seems to work pretty well. Part of the process is attempting to see if a record already exists in a target table using SQL. For example, if I extract book information out of the current row in the spreadsheet, it may contain a title and abstract. I use SQL to get the ID of a matching record, if it exists.

This works fine except when I have data that's in a non-English language. In this case, it seems that there is some punctuation that is causing me problems. At least I think it's punctuation as I do have some fields that do not have punctuation and are non-English that do not give me any problems.

Is there a built-in function that can escape these characters? Currently I have a small function that will escape the single quote character, but that isn't enough. Or, is there a list of Unicode characters that can interfere with how SQL wants data quoted?

Thanks in advance.