Dealing with Quotes and Special Characters
Problem
Your datafile contains quoted values or escaped characters.
Solution
Tell LOAD
DATA to be aware of them so that it
doesn’t load the values into the database
uninterpreted.
Discussion
The FIELDS clause
can specify other format options besides
TERMINATED BY. By default,
LOAD DATA assumes that values
are unquoted, and interprets the backslash
(\) as an escape character for special
characters. To indicate the value quoting character explicitly, use
ENCLOSED BY; MySQL will
strip that character from the ends of data values during input
processing. To change the default escape character, use
ESCAPED BY.
The three subclauses of the FIELDS clause
(ENCLOSED BY,
ESCAPED BY, and
TERMINATED BY) may be present
in any order if you specify more than one of them. For example, these
FIELDS clauses are equivalent:
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"' FIELDS ENCLOSED BY '"' TERMINATED BY ','
The TERMINATED BY sequence can
consist of multiple characters. If data values are separated within
input lines by something like *@*,
you’d indicate that like this:
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '*@*'
To disable escape processing entirely, specify an empty escape sequence:
FIELDS ESCAPED BY ''
When you specify ENCLOSED BY to indicate that quote characters should be stripped from data values, it’s possible to include the quote character literally within data values by doubling it or by preceding it with the escape character. For example, if the quote and escape characters are ...