How do I specify a row key in hbase shell that has a tab in it?

I had the same issue for binary values: \x00. This was my separator.

For the shell to accept your binary values, you need to provide them in double quote (") instead of single quote (').

put 'MyTable', "MyKey", 'Family:Qualifier', "\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x06Hello from shell"

Check how your tab is being encoded, my best bet would be that it is UTF8 encoded so from the ASCII table, this would be "000001\x09http://www.url.com/page".

On a side note, you should use null character for your separator, it will help you in scan.

Hope you can change the tab character. :) Yeah that's a bad idea since Map Reduce jobs use the tab as a delimiter, and its generally a bad idea to use a tab or space as a delimiter.

You could use a double colon (::) as a delimiter. But wait, what if the URL has a double-colon in the URL? Well, urlencode the URL when you store it to HBase - that way, you have a standard delimiter, and the URL part of the key will not conflict with the delimiter.

In Python:

import urllibDELIMITER = "::"urlkey = urllib.quote_plus(location)rowkey = item_id + DELIMITER + urlkey