How to avoid variable substitution in Oracle SQL Developer

When I try to execute this statement in Oracle SQL Developer 2.1 a dialog box "Enter Substitution Variable" pops up asking for a replacement value for TOBAGO,

update t set country = 'Trinidad and Tobago' where country = 'trinidad & tobago';

How can I avoid this without resorting to chr(38) or u'trinidad \0026 tobago' which both obscure the purpose of the statement?

Solution 1:

Call this before the query:

set define off;

Alternatively, hacky:

update t set country = 'Trinidad and Tobago' where country = 'trinidad &' || ' tobago';

From Tuning SQL*Plus:

SET DEFINE OFF disables the parsing of commands to replace substitution variables with their values.

Solution 2:

In SQL*Plus putting SET DEFINE ? at the top of the script will normally solve this. Might work for Oracle SQL Developer as well.