You can pass an escaped by clause Enable escaping for the delimiter characters by using the 'ESCAPED BY' clause (such as ESCAPED BY '\') Escaping is needed if you want to work with data that can contain these delimiter characters. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/Hive/LanguageManual+DDL CREATE TABLE my_table(a string, b string, ...) ROW FORMAT SERDE 'org.apache.hadoop.hive.serde2.OpenCSVSerde' WITH SERDEPROPERTIES ( "separatorChar" = "\t", "quoteChar" = "'", "escapeChar" = "\\" ) STORED AS TEXTFILE; Default properties for SerDe is Comma-Separated (CSV) file DEFAULT_ESCAPE_CHARACTER \ ... View more