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  • From: "Lowden, James K" <james.k.lowden AT alliancebernstein.com>
  • To: "FreeTDS Development Group" <freetds AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [freetds] freebcp: add support for escaping characters?
  • Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 16:28:09 -0500

> From: galt AT folkplanet.com
> Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2006 3:50 PM
>
> First, I should say that freetds is wonderful! I don't know what
> I'd do without it.

Good to hear. :-)

>
> Currently I am transferring data from Sybase to MySQL. It would
> be incredibly helpful if I could just have each field (in -c char
> mode) escaped according to the mysql conventions. Is there any
> hope of including support for this in freebcp?
> ...
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-real-escape-string.html
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/string-syntax.html

Before we do that, wouldn't this bit 'o Perl almost do what you want?

#! /usr/bin/perl -p
$end = chop;
s:['"\\_%]:\\$&:g; # literal escapes
s:\x0:\\0:g; # NUL
s:\b:\\b:g; # backspace
s:\n:\\n:g; # newline
s:\r:\\r:g; # return
s:\t:\\t:g; # tab
s:\cZ:\\z:g; # ^Z
print $_, $end;

It wouldn't be easy to add to freebcp. You'd wind up adding it to
src/dblib/bcp.c I think, because that's where the convert-to-character
and write-to-file functions are. You'd have to pass the "do the MySQL
thing" flag pretty deep into the code.

It's also icky. The whole idea of escaping my data so the utility I'm
using doesn't get confused about quoting and ^Z is pretty lame, if you
ask me. It should be the other way around: presented with clearly
described data, the utility should convert it to its internal format and
do its thing. From my perspective, everything but the delimiter is a
literal value. Isn't that the usual way?

Does MySQL have anything that helps you load something more standard,
like, say, CSV files? I could see adding CSV as a format that freebcp
understands.

--jkl



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