Parsing

This page provides a general overview of how Cypher® parses an input STRING.

The Cypher parser takes an arbitrary input STRING. This page details the general rules on which characters are considered valid input.

Using unicodes in Cypher

Unicodes can generally be escaped as \uxxx. For example, the below query uses the Unicode u00B0 to search for any recipe descriptions containing the degree symbol, º:

Using Unicodes in STRING matching
MATCH (r:Recipe)
WHERE r.description CONTAINS "\u00B0"
RETURN r

Additional documentation on escaping rules for STRING literals, names and regular expressions can be found here:

The Unicode version used by Cypher depends on the running JVM version.

Neo4j version JVM compliancy Unicode version

3.x

Java SE 8 Platform Specification

Unicode 6.2

4.x

Java SE 11 Platform Specification

Unicode 10.0

5.x

Java SE 17 Platform Specification

Unicode 13.0

5.14

Java SE 17 and Java SE 21 Platform Specification

Unicode 13.0 and Unicode 15.0

Supported whitespace

Whitespace can be used as a separator between keywords and has no semantic meaning. The following unicode characters are considered as whitespace:

Description List of included Unicode characters

Unicode general category Zp

\u2029

Unicode general category Zs

\u0020 (space), \u1680, \u2000-200A, \u202F, \u205F, \u3000

Unicode general category class Zl

\u2028

Horizontal tabulation

\t, \u0009

Line feed

\n, \u000A

Vertical tabulation

\u000B

Form feed

\f, \u000C

Carriage return

\r, \u000D

File separator

\u001C

Group separator

\u001D

Record separator

\u001E

Unit separator

\u001F

It is possible to have multiple whitespace characters in a row, and will have the same effect as using a single whitespace.

The following example query uses vertical tabulation (\u000B) as whitespace between the RETURN keyword and the variable m:

MATCH (m) RETURN\u000Bm;

Supported newline characters

A newline character identifies a new line in the query and is also considered whitespace. The supported newline characters in Cypher are:

Description List of included Unicode characters

Line feed

\n, \u000A

Carriage return

\r, \u000D

Carriage return + line feed

\r\n, \u000D\u000A