Question

I’ve searched this for a few hours already, but it doesn’t work.

I have a csv files of presidency. the first row is the header.

Presidency ,President ,Wikipedia Entry,Took office ,Left office ,Party ,Portrait,Thumbnail,Home State

I want to create a relation that has only Presidency, President, and Party.

$sqlquerycreate1 = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `sample1` (
  `Presidency`  VARCHAR(30),
  `President` VARCHAR(30),
  `Party` VARCHAR(30)
)";
mysql_query($sqlquerycreate1);

# download the file off the internet
$file = file_get_contents("http://localhost/sample.csv");
$filepath = "sample.csv";
file_put_contents($filepath, $file);

# load the data into nycgrid table
$pt11 = "LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ";
$pt21 = "'C:/xampp/htdocs/test/file/sample.csv' INTO TABLE sample1(Presidency,President,@Wikipedia Entry,@Took office ,@Left office ,Party,@Portrait,@Thumbnail,@Home State) ";
$pt31 = "FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '\"' ";
$pt41 = "LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n' ";
$pt51 = "IGNORE 1 LINES";
$sqlquerynew1 = $pt11.$pt21.$pt31.$pt41.$pt51;
mysql_query($sqlquerynew1);

It doesn’t work. The table is created, but no data loaded.
Any idea why? Thanks.

---

mysql> LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'C:/xampp/htdocs/sample.csv' INTO TABLE sample1(Pr
esidency, President, @x, @x, @x, Party, @x, @x, @x) FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENC
LOSED BY '\"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' IGNORE 1 LINES;


ERROR 1064 (42000): You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that
corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'FIELD
S TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '\"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' IGNORE 1 LINE' at
line 1

Answer 1

You have syntax errors in your LOAD DATA statement. In particular:

1. As stated in the manual:

   User variables are written as @var_name, where the variable name var_name consists of alphanumeric characters, “.”, “_”, and “$”. A user variable name can contain other characters if you quote it as a string or identifier (for example, @'my-var', @"my-var", or @`my-var`)

   Therefore your variables named @Wikipedia Entry, @Took office, @Left office and @Home state are all syntactically incorrect. You must either remove the whitespace or quote the variable names.

   However, you don’t need to use differing variable names unless you intend to refer to them elsewhere. As stated in the manual:

   You can also discard an input value by assigning it to a user variable and not assigning the variable to a table column:

   LOAD DATA INFILE 'file.txt'
     INTO TABLE t1
     (column1, @dummy, column2, @dummy, column3);
   

2. The FIELDS, LINES and IGNORE clauses should all preceed the column list. As stated in the manual, the syntax is:

   LOAD DATA [LOW_PRIORITY | CONCURRENT] [LOCAL] INFILE 'file_name'
       [REPLACE | IGNORE]
       INTO TABLE tbl_name
       [CHARACTER SET charset_name]
       [{FIELDS | COLUMNS}
           [TERMINATED BY 'string']
           [[OPTIONALLY] ENCLOSED BY 'char']
           [ESCAPED BY 'char']
       ]
       [LINES
           [STARTING BY 'string']
           [TERMINATED BY 'string']
       ]
       [IGNORE number LINES]
       [(col_name_or_user_var,...)]
       [SET col_name = expr,...]

Therefore, you can simply do:

LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE 'C:/xampp/htdocs/test/file/sample.csv'
    INTO TABLE sample1
    FIELDS
        TERMINATED BY ','
        ENCLOSED BY '\"'
    LINES
        TERMINATED BY '\r\n'
    IGNORE 1 LINES
    (Presidency, President, @x, @x, @x, Party, @x, @x, @x)