Jsut to clafiy, because now you've confused me: I use ? and it seems to quote exactly when i would expect it to. Which means treating numbers correctly. I avoid ->quote() as much as possible becuase it didnt' seem to DWIM as often as ? did and ? looks better to me. ;) So I think that the OP might need to say column="$quoted_string" or column  = ? and pass it an unquoted string.