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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T16:41:29+00:00

My client is providing me with an XSLX spreadsheet that, in some columns, can

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My client is providing me with an XSLX spreadsheet that, in some columns, can have single and/or double quotes. I’m opening it up in LibreOffice and saving it as a CSV. Then I try to import it in phpMyAdmin, but every time the import gets tripped up on a line with either single or double quotes, depending on which I indicate to use for escaping.

When saving the XLSX as a CSV I select UTF-8 for encoding (it’s defaulting to Windows-1252), comma for column delimiter, leave “Save cell content as shown” checked. For “Text delimiter” and “Quote all text cells”, I’ve tried both options each (single and double quotes for delimiter and checked/unchecked for Quote).

Then in phpMyAdmin, for the import I leave UTF-8 selected, columns enclosed with double-quote (or single quote, matching what I selected in LibreOffice) and for columns escaped with I’ve tried backslash and double-quote and single-quote.

In ALL cases I keep getting the error “Invalid column count in CSV input on line n.” The line number depends on what I selected for column escape/delimiter (single or double quote). If I selected double quote as delimiter, I get the error on the first line that has a column with an unescaped single quote in it, and vice versa for single quote delimiters.

How can I get this spreadsheet imported with both single and double quotes in the cells?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Okay, after some more research and “fiddling around” I figured it out.

    In my situation, for the import I selected CSV using LOAD DATA, used double quotes for “columns enclosed with”, and cleared the columns escaped with.

    LOAD DATA apparently tells phpMyAdmin to allow MySQL to handle the file directly. I’m not sure why this would affect my issue if I can specify delimiters, etc for the “regular” CSV import selection, but it seems to have worked for me!

    Hope this helps someone else out.

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