# Symbol Assignment

**URL:** <https://forum.kx.com/t/symbol-assignment/11196>\
**Category:** Community Support\
**Tags:** kdb-and-q\
**Created:** [August 21, 2016, 10:56pm UTC](https://forum.kx.com/t/symbol-assignment/11196 "2016-08-21T22:56:00Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Kevin4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Kevin4](https://forum.kx.com/u/Kevin4)\
**Post date:** [August 21, 2016, 10:56pm UTC](https://forum.kx.com/t/symbol-assignment/11196/1 "2016-08-21T22:56:00Z")

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Hello, I am new to q and kdb and have just downloaded the trial version to begin learning. I have gone through several of the tutorials and everything seems to be working correctly. However, whenever I try and assign a symbol to a variable it does not work with a return value of ‘’. Like this:

q)mysymbol:'symbola

'symbola

q)yoursymbols:'symbola’symbolb

‘’

q)mysymbol

'mysymbol

q)yoursymbols

'yoursymbols

and when I try to inspect the namespace I get:

q)key ’

!:’

q)value '.

‘’

Am I assigning these incorrectly or is there something else that I am missing. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I can’t continue with any of the tutorials until I can get this to work as expected.

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**Author:** ![pauljloughran](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/9e8a1a/32.png) [@pauljloughran](https://forum.kx.com/u/pauljloughran)\
**Post date:** [August 22, 2016, 7:12am UTC](https://forum.kx.com/t/symbol-assignment/11196/2 "2016-08-22T07:12:00Z")

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Hi Kevin,

You are using apostrophe (')&nbsp; as opposed to backtick (`).

Regards,  
Paul