dump via csv file - records break up

Fritz

I am using phpmyadmin to test dumping of data with TAB separated fields...

Everything is cool BUT ...

whether I use \r or \n as the line/record terminator... I just can't keep the the records from being broken up by ANY field that has a carrige return IN the data....

3 records example... (two fields: name - comment)

bob (tab) blah blah blah (end record)
tom (tab) blah blah blah (end record)
mike (tab) blah blah blah (end record)

is cool and I can import this file... BUT if the comment field has a carrige return I am screwed

bob (tab) blah blah blah (end record)
tom (tab) blah blah (end record)
blah (end record)
mike (tab) blah blah blah (end record)

Tom hit a carrige return ....

HOW can I keep this in the same field in the dumping to a tab delimited text file?

undertow

One way to get around this problem is to convert all your newlines to XHTML linebreaks with nl2br(). This is especially useful if you will eventually be outputting your data to a web page.

The other solution is to use a different record terminator, which I believe you can do in phpMyAdmin. This may or may not work depending on what you're trying to import into (if it's just going to be imported back into phpMyAdmin you can select a regular schema/data dump which generates SQL commands). For Excel, I think there's a special export as Excel CSV option so just use that. I mean, you're using tabs as the field delimeters so you're not exactly comma separating the data anyway :p.

Those are basically your two choices, at least until someone posts better ones.

ultraslacker

Through mysql terminal you can specify a a character to enclose fields - can you do that in phpmyadmin?

undertow

Yes you can, in two places. When you are exporting you can choose the field-enclosing character. When you are importing, you can choose what character MySQL will use when reading the file based on how that file was written.

Fritz

just wrap it (the nl2br function) around like this...

$profile=(strip_tags(nl2br($profile)));

undertow

Yes that would work. You don't need the outer parens though I don't think.