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title: Special Characters
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  - Analytics SAQL Developer Guide
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---

# 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"];`                                                                                                                                                                |