quote:

For both the LOAD DATA INFILE and SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE statements, the syntax of the FIELDS and LINES clauses is the same. Both clauses are optional, but FIELDS must precede LINES if both are specified.

If you specify a FIELDS clause, each of its subclauses (TERMINATED BY, [OPTIONALLY] ENCLOSED BY, and ESCAPED BY) is also optional, except that you must specify at least one of them.

If you specify no FIELDS clause, the defaults are the same as if you had written this:

FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' ENCLOSED BY '' ESCAPED BY '\\'

If you specify no LINES clause, the defaults are the same as if you had written this:

LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' STARTING BY ''

In other words, the defaults cause LOAD DATA INFILE to act as follows when reading input:

*

Look for line boundaries at newlines.
*

Do not skip over any line prefix.
*

Break lines into fields at tabs.
*

Do not expect fields to be enclosed within any quoting characters.
*

Interpret occurrences of tab, newline, or “\” preceded by “\” as literal characters that are part of field values.

Conversely, the defaults cause SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE to act as follows when writing output:

*

Write tabs between fields.
*

Do not enclose fields within any quoting characters.
*

Use “\” to escape instances of tab, newline, or “\” that occur within field values.
*

Write newlines at the ends of lines.

Backslash is the MySQL escape character within strings, so to write FIELDS ESCAPED BY '\\', you must specify two backslashes for the value to be interpreted as a single backslash.
Note

If you have generated the text file on a Windows system, you might have to use LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n' to read the file properly, because Windows programs typically use two characters as a line terminator. Some programs, such as WordPad, might use \r as a line terminator when writing files. To read such files, use LINES TERMINATED BY '\r'.

If all the lines you want to read in have a common prefix that you want to ignore, you can use LINES STARTING BY 'prefix_string' to skip over the prefix, and anything before it. If a line does not include the prefix, the entire line is skipped. Suppose that you issue the following statement:

LOAD DATA INFILE '/tmp/test.txt' INTO TABLE test
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' LINES STARTING BY 'xxx';

If the data file looks like this:

xxx"abc",1
something xxx"def",2
"ghi",3

The resulting rows will be ("abc",1) and ("def",2). The third row in the file is skipped because it does not contain the prefix.

The IGNORE number LINES option can be used to ignore lines at the start of the file. For example, you can use IGNORE 1 LINES to skip over an initial header line containing column names:

LOAD DATA INFILE '/tmp/test.txt' INTO TABLE test IGNORE 1 LINES;

When you use SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE in tandem with LOAD DATA INFILE to write data from a database into a file and then read the file back into the database later, the field- and line-handling options for both statements must match. Otherwise, LOAD DATA INFILE will not interpret the contents of the file properly. Suppose that you use SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE to write a file with fields delimited by commas:

SELECT * INTO OUTFILE 'data.txt'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
FROM table2;

To read the comma-delimited file back in, the correct statement would be:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'data.txt' INTO TABLE table2
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',';

If instead you tried to read in the file with the statement shown following, it wouldn't work because it instructs LOAD DATA INFILE to look for tabs between fields:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'data.txt' INTO TABLE table2
FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t';

The likely result is that each input line would be interpreted as a single field.

LOAD DATA INFILE can be used to read files obtained from external sources. For example, many programs can export data in comma-separated values (CSV) format, such that lines have fields separated by commas and enclosed within double quotes. If lines in such a file are terminated by newlines, the statement shown here illustrates the field- and line-handling options you would use to load the file:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'data.txt' INTO TABLE tbl_name
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';

If the input values are not necessarily enclosed within quotes, use OPTIONALLY before the ENCLOSED BY keywords.

Any of the field- or line-handling options can specify an empty string (''). If not empty, the FIELDS [OPTIONALLY] ENCLOSED BY and FIELDS ESCAPED BY values must be a single character. The FIELDS TERMINATED BY, LINES STARTING BY, and LINES TERMINATED BY values can be more than one character. For example, to write lines that are terminated by carriage return/linefeed pairs, or to read a file containing such lines, specify a LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n' clause.

To read a file containing jokes that are separated by lines consisting of %%, you can do this

CREATE TABLE jokes
(a INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
joke TEXT NOT NULL);
LOAD DATA INFILE '/tmp/jokes.txt' INTO TABLE jokes
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ''
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n%%\n' (joke);

FIELDS [OPTIONALLY] ENCLOSED BY controls quoting of fields. For output (SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE), if you omit the word OPTIONALLY, all fields are enclosed by the ENCLOSED BY character. An example of such output (using a comma as the field delimiter) is shown here:

"1","a string","100.20"
"2","a string containing a , comma","102.20"
"3","a string containing a \" quote","102.20"
"4","a string containing a \", quote and comma","102.20"

If you specify OPTIONALLY, the ENCLOSED BY character is used only to enclose values from columns that have a string data type (such as CHAR, BINARY, TEXT, or ENUM):

1,"a string",100.20
2,"a string containing a , comma",102.20
3,"a string containing a \" quote",102.20
4,"a string containing a \", quote and comma",102.20

Note that occurrences of the ENCLOSED BY character within a field value are escaped by prefixing them with the ESCAPED BY character. Also note that if you specify an empty ESCAPED BY value, it is possible to inadvertently generate output that cannot be read properly by LOAD DATA INFILE. For example, the preceding output just shown would appear as follows if the escape character is empty. Observe that the second field in the fourth line contains a comma following the quote, which (erroneously) appears to terminate the field:

1,"a string",100.20
2,"a string containing a , comma",102.20
3,"a string containing a " quote",102.20
4,"a string containing a ", quote and comma",102.20

For input, the ENCLOSED BY character, if present, is stripped from the ends of field values. (This is true regardless of whether OPTIONALLY is specified; OPTIONALLY has no effect on input interpretation.) Occurrences of the ENCLOSED BY character preceded by the ESCAPED BY character are interpreted as part of the current field value.

If the field begins with the ENCLOSED BY character, instances of that character are recognized as terminating a field value only if followed by the field or line TERMINATED BY sequence. To avoid ambiguity, occurrences of the ENCLOSED BY character within a field value can be doubled and are interpreted as a single instance of the character. For example, if ENCLOSED BY '"' is specified, quotes are handled as shown here:

"The ""BIG"" boss" -> The "BIG" boss
The "BIG" boss -> The "BIG" boss
The ""BIG"" boss -> The ""BIG"" boss

FIELDS ESCAPED BY controls how to write or read special characters. If the FIELDS ESCAPED BY character is not empty, it is used to prefix the following characters on output:

*

The FIELDS ESCAPED BY character
*

The FIELDS [OPTIONALLY] ENCLOSED BY character
*

The first character of the FIELDS TERMINATED BY and LINES TERMINATED BY values
*

ASCII 0 (what is actually written following the escape character is ASCII “0”, not a zero-valued byte)

If the FIELDS ESCAPED BY character is empty, no characters are escaped and NULL is output as NULL, not \N. It is probably not a good idea to specify an empty escape character, particularly if field values in your data contain any of the characters in the list just given.

For input, if the FIELDS ESCAPED BY character is not empty, occurrences of that character are stripped and the following character is taken literally as part of a field value. Some two-character sequences that are exceptions, where the first character is the escape character. These sequences are shown in the following table (using “\” for the escape character). The rules for NULL handling are described later in this section.
\0 An ASCII 0 (NUL) character
\b A backspace character
\n A newline (linefeed) character
\r A carriage return character
\t A tab character.
\Z ASCII 26 (Control-Z)
\N NULL

For more information about “\”-escape syntax, see Section 9.1, “Literal Values”.

In certain cases, field- and line-handling options interact:

*

If LINES TERMINATED BY is an empty string and FIELDS TERMINATED BY is non-empty, lines are also terminated with FIELDS TERMINATED BY.
*

If the FIELDS TERMINATED BY and FIELDS ENCLOSED BY values are both empty (''), a fixed-row (non-delimited) format is used. With fixed-row format, no delimiters are used between fields (but you can still have a line terminator). Instead, column values are read and written using a field width wide enough to hold all values in the field. For TINYINT, SMALLINT, MEDIUMINT, INT, and BIGINT, the field widths are 4, 6, 8, 11, and 20, respectively, no matter what the declared display width is.

LINES TERMINATED BY is still used to separate lines. If a line does not contain all fields, the rest of the columns are set to their default values. If you do not have a line terminator, you should set this to ''. In this case, the text file must contain all fields for each row.

Fixed-row format also affects handling of NULL values, as described later. Note that fixed-size format does not work if you are using a multi-byte character set.
Note

Before MySQL 4.1.12, fixed-row format used the display width of the column. For example, INT(4) was read or written using a field with a width of 4. However, if the column contained wider values, they were dumped to their full width, leading to the possibility of a “ragged” field holding values of different widths. Using a field wide enough to hold all values in the field prevents this problem. However, data files written before this change was made might not be reloaded correctly with LOAD DATA INFILE for MySQL 4.1.12 and up. This change also affects data files read by mysqlimport and written by mysqldump --tab, which use LOAD DATA INFILE and SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE.

Handling of NULL values varies according to the FIELDS and LINES options in use:

*

For the default FIELDS and LINES values, NULL is written as a field value of \N for output, and a field value of \N is read as NULL for input (assuming that the ESCAPED BY character is “\”).
*

If FIELDS ENCLOSED BY is not empty, a field containing the literal word NULL as its value is read as a NULL value. This differs from the word NULL enclosed within FIELDS ENCLOSED BY characters, which is read as the string 'NULL'.
*

If FIELDS ESCAPED BY is empty, NULL is written as the word NULL.
*

With fixed-row format (which is used when FIELDS TERMINATED BY and FIELDS ENCLOSED BY are both empty), NULL is written as an empty string. Note that this causes both NULL values and empty strings in the table to be indistinguishable when written to the file because both are written as empty strings. If you need to be able to tell the two apart when reading the file back in, you should not use fixed-row format.

An attempt to load NULL into a NOT NULL column causes assignment of the implicit default value for the column's data type and a warning. Implicit default values are discussed in Section 11.1.4, “Data Type Default Values”.

Some cases are not supported by LOAD DATA INFILE:

*

Fixed-size rows (FIELDS TERMINATED BY and FIELDS ENCLOSED BY both empty) and BLOB or TEXT columns.
*

If you specify one separator that is the same as or a prefix of another, LOAD DATA INFILE cannot interpret the input properly. For example, the following FIELDS clause would cause problems:

FIELDS TERMINATED BY '"' ENCLOSED BY '"'

*

If FIELDS ESCAPED BY is empty, a field value that contains an occurrence of FIELDS ENCLOSED BY or LINES TERMINATED BY followed by the FIELDS TERMINATED BY value causes LOAD DATA INFILE to stop reading a field or line too early. This happens because LOAD DATA INFILE cannot properly determine where the field or line value ends.

The following example loads all columns of the persondata table:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'persondata.txt' INTO TABLE persondata;

By default, when no column list is provided at the end of the LOAD DATA INFILE statement, input lines are expected to contain a field for each table column. If you want to load only some of a table's columns, specify a column list:

LOAD DATA INFILE 'persondata.txt' INTO TABLE persondata (col1,col2,...);

You must also specify a column list if the order of the fields in the input file differs from the order of the columns in the table. Otherwise, MySQL cannot tell how to match input fields with table columns.

If an input line has too many fields, the extra fields are ignored and the number of warnings is incremented.

If an input line has too few fields, the table columns for which input fields are missing are set to their default values. Default value assignment is described in Section 11.1.4, “Data Type Default Values”.

An empty field value is interpreted differently than if the field value is missing:

*

For string types, the column is set to the empty string.
*

For numeric types, the column is set to 0.
*

For date and time types, the column is set to the appropriate “zero” value for the type. See Section 11.3, “Date and Time Types”.

These are the same values that result if you assign an empty string explicitly to a string, numeric, or date or time type explicitly in an INSERT or UPDATE statement.

TIMESTAMP columns are set to the current date and time only if there is a NULL value for the column (that is, \N) and the column is not declared to allow NULL values, or if the TIMESTAMP column's default value is the current timestamp and it is omitted from the field list when a field list is specified.

LOAD DATA INFILE regards all input as strings, so you cannot use numeric values for ENUM or SET columns the way you can with INSERT statements. All ENUM and SET values must be specified as strings.

When the LOAD DATA INFILE statement finishes, it returns an information string in the following format:

Records: 1 Deleted: 0 Skipped: 0 Warnings: 0

If you are using the C API, you can get information about the statement by calling the mysql_info() function. See Section 17.2.3.33, “mysql_info()”.

Warnings occur under the same circumstances as when values are inserted via the INSERT statement (see Section 13.2.4, “INSERT Syntax”), except that LOAD DATA INFILE also generates warnings when there are too few or too many fields in the input row. The warnings are not stored anywhere; the number of warnings can be used only as an indication of whether everything went well.

From MySQL 4.1.1 on, you can use SHOW WARNINGS to get a list of the first max_error_count warnings as information about what went wrong. See Section 13.5.4.21, “SHOW WARNINGS Syntax”.

Before MySQL 4.1.1, only a warning count is available to indicate that something went wrong. If you get warnings and want to know exactly why you got them, one way to do this is to dump the table into another file using SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE and compare the file to your original input file.