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MySQL Cookbook
book

MySQL Cookbook

by Paul DuBois
October 2002
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1024 pages
27h 26m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from MySQL Cookbook

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 ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596001452Catalog PageErrata