How to escape a colon ':' character in a core module query?

[rjaros]

Is there any possibility to use a colon ':' character in a query? It seems to be always used as a query parameter.
For instance there is no way to use a string 'HH:mm' or PostgreSQL casting '3'::int.

[thinkslynk]

Super old comment on what looks to be an unmaintained project, but just in case anyone else runs into this, I got around this issue by passing in the date format as a parameter.

db.update(
    "UPDATE my_table SET my_date=to_timestamp(:my_date, :format) at time zone 'Etc/UTC'",
    mapOf(
                "format" to "YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS",
                "my_date" to setTo
    )
)

Not sure if there's an official way to get around this, but you can always pass in chunks like that as a work around.