You have to add a backslash to certain characters to make your string fit into SQL syntax rules.
Assuming you're creating your query dynamically, PHP has special escaping function for this and you should use it for the every quoted string in the query, no exceptions.
So, write your code like this:
$salt = "Y'Z";
$id = 1;
$salt = mysql_real_escape_string($salt);
$id = mysql_real_escape_string($id);
$sql = "update table1 set saltval = '$salt' where uid ='$id'";
mysql_query($sql) or trigger_error(mysql_error()." ".$sql);
to make it safe and fault-tolerant