[prrao87]

Why

Labels, relationship types and columns whose names contain spaces or other characters, or match a keyword, can't be referenced today. Cypher identifiers only accept letters, digits and _, so a key column such as asset id is unreachable. Applications that build queries from a schema have to skip those columns.

This adds the standard quoting for each language: backticks in Cypher, as openCypher defines them, and double quotes in SQL, including inside GRAPH_TABLE as SQL/PGQ defines them.

What changed

Cypher. Any label, relationship type, variable, property name, map key or alias may be backtick-quoted:

MATCH (x:`Device Type`)-[:`PART OF`]->(`match`)
WHERE x.`asset id` IN $keys
RETURN x.`asset id` AS `asset id`, `match`.name AS `a``b`

A quoted name may contain any character and may match a keyword. Inside one, two backticks stand for one backtick. The quotes are removed while parsing, so planning, column resolution and output column names see the plain name (asset id, a`b). The existing case-insensitive matching is unchanged. Function names and $parameters stay unquoted.

SQL. The surrounding query already took double-quoted identifiers from DataFusion. Inside GRAPH_TABLE, double quotes now name identifiers too, and "" stands for one ":

SELECT g."asset id" FROM GRAPH_TABLE (
    MATCH (x:"Device Type") WHERE x.status = 'active'
    COLUMNS (x."asset id" AS "asset id")
) g

Backticks also work inside GRAPH_TABLE. The direct graph_table('...') call still takes Cypher text exactly as written.

Query results that change

Inside a GRAPH_TABLE (...) clause, "..." used to be a Cypher string literal. It is now an identifier, so strings there must use single quotes, as in the rest of the SQL query. WHERE a.name = "Alice" now compares against a property named Alice. No existing test or docs example used double-quoted strings in GRAPH_TABLE.

Docs

The Cypher guide gains a quoted-names section. The SQL guide now describes the GRAPH_TABLE body as Cypher with SQL's quoting. It also notes that SqlEngine registers table names in lowercase, so a quoted table name must be lowercase as well: "device type", not "Device Type".

Validation

• New Rust and Python tests run with and without the CSR. They cover a label, relationship type and property containing spaces, keywords as variables and aliases (match, return, where, select), an escaped backtick, an inline property map, and SQL with double quotes in both the outer query and GRAPH_TABLE. A unit test covers the GRAPH_TABLE quote rewrite, including "", backticks inside double quotes, and a " inside a single-quoted string.
• Locally: cargo test --workspace, cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings, cargo fmt --check, the Python suite (1700 passed), ruff, pyright, typos and the strict docs build all pass.
• Updated with main after fix(query): support bound string predicates and untyped relationships across labels #120 merged (it also changes the parser). On the combined code, Rust tests, Clippy and the Python suite (1706 passed) all pass.
• CI is pending.

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