Im about to start writing a method that willl take a text file of:

value1, value2, value3
value1, value2, value3
value1, value2, value3

And copy those values to a MySQL DB (so in this case, 3 entries with 3 fields). I also need to convert the MySQL back into text files. The number of values is variable, as is the name of the MySQL table they will be written to.

Before I dive in and write the thing, it occured to me that this is something that must have been done many times before, probably by more competent coders than me. Ive had a search round the manual and the net but cant find anything, anybody know where i could look?

Thanks for any feedback.

phpMyadmin has facilities to import CSV (comma separated value) files directly into mysql.

Originally Posted by 0beron

phpMyadmin has facilities to import CSV (comma separated value) files directly into mysql.

...along with ability to dump the data back into CSV

In fact it is mysql feature, not phpMyAdmin. If you can call mysql command from your script then it is not a problem to even upload the file and merge it by script instead of starting PMA.

hmmm... are you guys talking about the 'LOAD DATA INFILE' MySQL syntax? thats what im looking into at the moment, it seems to do everything i need.

In fact I was talking about "mysqldump" and "mysql -p mybase < data.csv"