Is there a less bug-prone way to include quote in selector string variable when defining opt.TableSelector?

My situation is to readtable( ) several tables, each of which has a specific title, from an html file. I have come up with a couple solutions to define TableSelector, but it is bug prone. Is there a better way?

opt = htmlImportOptions;
opt.TableSelector = "//TABLE[contains(.,'Cash dividends')]";

headings = ["'Music'", "Photo"];

%% correct selector string, but bug prone
opt.TableSelector = "//TABLE[contains(.," + headings(1) +")]";
opt.TableSelector

ans = "//TABLE[contains(.,'Music')]"

% readtable(html, opt) 

%% wrong solution
opt.TableSelector = "TABLE[contains(.,"+ headings(2) +")]";
opt.TableSelector

ans = "TABLE[contains(.,Photo)]"

% readtable(html, opt) % would return no error message, so it's a bug source.

%% fix the wrong solution
str1 = "TABLE[contains(.,'";
str2 = "')]";
opt.TableSelector = str1 + headings(2) + str2;
opt.TableSelector

ans = "TABLE[contains(.,'Photo')]"

% readtable(html, opt)

[Walter Roberson]

Is it possible that the headings to use could ever contain ' themselves? If so then it will be necessary to protect against that.

[Walter Roberson]

Reading further, I see that we do not need to worry about "escape characters" -- for example if the user specified 'Music\' then the \' would be treated as two distinct unrelated characters, not as indicating "the next character is a literal quote". So we do not need to "sanitize" the input against an assortment of characters.

We do, however, potentially need to worry about the possibility that the headings contain ' characters or " characters.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14822153/escape-single-quote-in-xpath-with-nokogiri

[Simon]

@Walter Roberson Thanks for the comment. No, the headings would not have ' or " themselves.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

opt.TableSelector = "TABLE[contains(.,'" + headings(2) + "')]";

or

opt.TableSelector = compose("Table[contains(.,'%s')", headings(2));

[Simon]

Great thanks!