Question

I am trying to understand how to write a query to import my goodreads.com book list (csv) into my own database. I’m using PHP.

$query = "load data local infile 'uploads/filename.csv' into table books 
            RETURN 1 LINES 
    FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
    ENCLOSED BY '\"'
    LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' 
    (Title, Author, ISBN)";

This results in data in the wrong columns, I also can’t get the ISBN, no matter what I try, guessing the equals (=) sign is causing some problems.

Here’s the first two lines of the CSV:

Book Id,Title,Author,Author l-f,Additional Authors,ISBN,ISBN13,My Rating,Average Rating,Publisher,Binding,Number of Pages,Year Published,Original Publication Year,Date Read,Date Added,Bookshelves,Bookshelves with positions,Exclusive Shelf,My Review,Spoiler,Private Notes,Read Count,Recommended For,Recommended By,Owned Copies,Original Purchase Date,Original Purchase Location,Condition,Condition Description,BCID
11487807,"Throne of the Crescent Moon (The Crescent Moon Kingdoms, #1)","Saladin Ahmed","Ahmed, Saladin","",="0756407117",="9780756407117",0,"3.87","DAW","Hardcover","288",2012,2012,,2012/02/19,"to-read","to-read (#51)","to-read",,"",,,,,0,,,,,

What I want to do is only import the Title, Author, and ISBN for all books to a table that has the following fields: id (auto), title, author, isbn. I want to exclude the first row as well because I dont want the column headers, but when I have tried that it fails every time.

What’s wrong with my query?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, in case you want to use the native MySQL CSV parser, you will have to create a table that matches the column count of the CSV file. Simply drop the unnecessary columns when the import is finished.