Literals

A literal is a constant value expression, with special syntax rules for each data type.

Numbers

Number literals can contain number characters as well as a period, underscores and char e.

If a number literal contains a dot or character e, it is treated as floating point number (or just float), otherwise it is treated as integer number.

Character e denotes “scientific notation”, where the number after e is the exponent in 10-base.

Underscores are ignored, so they can be placed at arbitrary positions, but it is advised to use them as thousand separators.

Integers can, alternatively, be expressed using hexadecimal, octal or binary notation using these prefixes respectively: 0x, 0o or 0b.

PRQL

from numbers
select {
    small = 1.000_000_1,
    big = 5_000_000,
    huge = 5e9,
    binary = 0x0011,
    hex = 0x80,
    octal = 0o777,
}

SQL

SELECT
  1.0000001 AS small,
  5000000 AS big,
  5000000000.0 AS huge,
  17 AS binary,
  128 AS hex,
  511 AS octal
FROM
  numbers

Strings

PRQL supports string literals and several other formats of strings. See the Strings page for more information.

Booleans

Boolean values can be expressed with true or false keyword.

Null

The null value can be expressed with null keyword. See also the discussion of how PRQL handles nulls.

Date and time

Date and time literals are expressed with character @, followed by a string that encodes the date & time.

Note

PRQL’s notation is designed to be less verbose than SQL’s TIMESTAMP '2004-10-19 10:23:54' and more explicit than SQL’s implicit option that just uses a string '2004-10-19 10:23:54'.

Dates

Dates are represented by @{yyyy-mm-dd} — a @ followed by the date format.

PRQL

from employees
derive age_at_year_end = (@2022-12-31 - dob)

SQL

SELECT
  *,
  DATE '2022-12-31' - dob AS age_at_year_end
FROM
  employees

Times

Times are represented by @{HH:mm:ss.SSS±Z} with any parts not supplied defaulting to zero. This includes the timezone, which is represented by +HH:mm, -HH:mm or Z. This is consistent with the ISO8601 time format.

PRQL

from orders
derive should_have_shipped_today = (order_time < @08:30)

SQL

SELECT
  *,
  order_time < TIME '08:30' AS should_have_shipped_today
FROM
  orders

Timestamps

Timestamps are represented by @{yyyy-mm-ddTHH:mm:ss.SSS±Z} / @{date}T{time}, with any time parts not supplied being rounded to zero, including the timezone, which is represented by +HH:mm, -HH:mm or Z (: is optional). This is @ followed by the ISO8601 datetime format, which uses T to separate date & time.

PRQL

from commits
derive first_prql_commit = @2020-01-01T13:19:55-08:00
derive first_prql_commit_utc = @2020-01-02T21:19:55Z

SQL

SELECT
  *,
  TIMESTAMP '2020-01-01T13:19:55-0800' AS first_prql_commit,
  TIMESTAMP '2020-01-02T21:19:55Z' AS first_prql_commit_utc
FROM
  commits

Durations

Durations are represented by {N}{periods}, such as 2years or 10minutes, without a space.

Note

These aren’t the same as ISO8601, because we evaluated P3Y6M4DT12H30M5S to be difficult to understand, but we could support a simplified form if there’s demand for it. We don’t currently support compound expressions, for example 2years10months, but most DBs will allow 2years + 10months. Please raise an issue if this is inconvenient.

PRQL

from projects
derive first_check_in = start + 10days

SQL

SELECT
  *,
  start + INTERVAL 10 DAY AS first_check_in
FROM
  projects

Examples

Here’s a larger list of date and time examples:

• @20221231 is invalid — it must contain full punctuation (- and :),
• @2022-12-31 is a date
• @2022-12 or @2022 are invalid — SQL can’t express a month, only a date
• @16:54:32.123456 is a time
• @16:54:32, @16:54, @16 are all allowed, expressing @16:54:32.000000, @16:54:00.000000, @16:00:00.000000 respectively
• @2022-12-31T16:54:32.123456 is a timestamp without timezone
• @2022-12-31T16:54:32.123456Z is a timestamp in UTC
• @2022-12-31T16:54+02 is timestamp in UTC+2
• @2022-12-31T16:54+02:00 and @2022-12-31T16:54+02 are datetimes in UTC+2
• @16:54+02 is invalid — time is always local, so it cannot have a timezone
• @2022-12-31+02 is invalid — date is always local, so it cannot have a timezone

Note

Currently prql-compiler does not parse or validate any of the datetime strings and will pass them to the database engine without adjustment. This might be refined in the future to aid in compatibility across databases. We’ll always support the canonical ISO8601 format described above.

Roadmap

Datetimes (as a distinct datatype from the timestamps) are supported by some databases (e.g. MySql, BigQuery). With the addition of type casts, these could be represented by a timestamp cast to a datetime:

derive pi_day = @2017-03-14T15:09:26.535898<datetime>

These are some examples we can then add:

• @2022-12-31T16:54<datetime> is datetime without timezone
• @2022-12-31<datetime> is forbidden — datetime must specify time
• @16:54<datetime> is forbidden — datetime must specify date