Question

I’m converting a sqlite3 database to mysql.

I have a nice command file for sed that changes AUTOINCREMEMT and the other things needed, but I’m stuck on the last one: double quotes.

sqlite3 dump format:

CREATE TABLE "products" (
  "id" INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT NOT NULL, 
  "name" varchar(255), 
  "desc" varchar(255) );

INSERT INTO "products" VALUES(1,'Flux Capacitor',
  'This is the "real" thing.\nPromise!')

For the first statement, I can replace all double quotes with backticks and mysql will be happy.

However, my product information has double quotes in the data. How can I exclude these from being replaced? I was trying to replace only those double quotes with a placeholder, then I could replace all the other double quotes, then I could change the placeholder back, but my regex-fu isn’t up to par.

This was as far as I got:

/"[^"]*"/s

… to match the double quoted texts, but I couldn’t figure out how to qualify that only double quotes inside single quotes should be matched.

Answer 1

I would change MySQL to accept double-quotes as identifier delimiters. This is standard SQL behavior, and you can make MySQL behave that way with a SQL mode:

mysql> SET SQL_MODE = ANSI;

Or more specifically:

mysql> SET SQL_MODE = ANSI_QUOTES;

Then MySQL should understand your data dump.

See “Server SQL Modes” for more information.