hibernate/hibernate-orm · error · IllegalArgumentException

Unquoted count of quotes is invalid

Error message

Unquoted count of quotes is invalid

What it means

StringHelper.countUnquoted(string, character) counts occurrences of a character outside single-quoted regions, so counting the single-quote character itself is meaningless — every quote is both the delimiter and the candidate match. The method therefore rejects the quote character up front with IllegalArgumentException. This is an invariant guard, not a runtime condition you can hit with data.

Source

Thrown at hibernate-core/src/main/java/org/hibernate/internal/util/StringHelper.java:536

			return 0;
		}
		text = text.trim();
		if ( text.isEmpty() ) {
			return 0;
		}
		int count = 0;
		for ( int i = 0, max = text.length(); i < max; i++ ) {
			final char check = text.charAt( i );
			if ( check == match ) {
				count++;
			}
		}
		return count;
	}

	public static int countUnquoted(String string, char character) {
		if ( '\'' == character ) {
			throw new IllegalArgumentException( "Unquoted count of quotes is invalid" );
		}
		if ( string == null ) {
			return 0;
		}
		// Impl note: takes advantage of the fact that an escaped single quote
		// embedded within a quote-block can really be handled as two separate
		// quote-blocks for the purposes of this method...
		int count = 0;
		final int stringLength = string.length();
		boolean inQuote = false;
		for ( int indx = 0; indx < stringLength; indx++ ) {
			char c = string.charAt( indx );
			if ( inQuote ) {
				if ( '\'' == c ) {
					inQuote = false;
				}
			}
			else if ( '\'' == c ) {

View on GitHub (pinned to fad1729dce)

Solutions

1. If you need the total number of single quotes, use StringHelper.count(string, '\'') instead.
2. If you need quotes outside quote-blocks, note that each quote flips in/out of a block — the concept is ill-defined, so rethink the parsing (e.g., a proper tokenizer).
3. If iterating over characters, skip '\'' explicitly when delegating to countUnquoted.

Example fix

// before
int n = StringHelper.countUnquoted(sql, '\''); // IllegalArgumentException

// after
int totalQuotes = StringHelper.count(sql, '\'');

static int safeCountUnquoted(String text, char c) {
    if (c == '\'') {
        return StringHelper.count(text, '\''); // quote char not supported by countUnquoted
    }
    return StringHelper.countUnquoted(text, c);
}

When it happens

Trigger: Calling StringHelper.countUnquoted(text, '\'') — the check fires immediately regardless of the string argument, before any scanning starts.

Common situations: Generic character-counting utilities that iterate over candidate characters including quotes; copy-paste use of the helper while inspecting SQL fragments for delimiters; code written against count() and adapted to countUnquoted() without dropping the quote case.

Related errors

• json_object must have an even number of arguments, but found
• Length must be great-than-or-equal to zero.
• Length must be great-than-or-equal to zero.
• Length must be greater than or equal to zero
• startTimeNanos [${startTimeNanos}] should be greater than 0

AI-assisted analysis of hibernate/hibernate-orm@fad1729dce (2026-08-22). Data as JSON: /api/errors/0b3f3b6c7b7c5a1f. Report an issue: GitHub.