Hi All

First of all can somebody tell me if this is possible...I want to extract to a text file all usernames , Birthdays and Post Counts from my forum.

Is this possible? Is this easy? Can somebody Assist?

Thanks

>> Is this possible?
Yes,

>> Is this easy?
Not too difficult

>>Can somebody Assist?
probably, though more info is needed.

Google is your friend. This comes straight from the MySQL manual on the select syntax:

Originally Posted by MySQL Manual

The SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE 'file_name' form of SELECT writes the selected rows to a file. The file is created on the server host, so you must have the FILE privilege to use this syntax. file_name cannot be an existing file, which among other things prevents files such as /etc/passwd and database tables from being destroyed.

The SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE statement is intended primarily to let you very quickly dump a table on the server machine. If you want to create the resulting file on some client host other than the server host, you cannot use SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE. In that case, you should instead use some command like mysql -e "SELECT ..." > file_name on the client host to generate the file.

SELECT ... INTO OUTFILE is the complement of LOAD DATA INFILE; the syntax for the export_options part of the statement consists of the same FIELDS and LINES clauses that are used with the LOAD DATA INFILE statement. See Section 13.2.5, “LOAD DATA INFILE Syntax”.

FIELDS ESCAPED BY controls how to write special characters. If the FIELDS ESCAPED BY character is not empty, it is used to prefix the following characters on output:

*

The FIELDS ESCAPED BY character
*

The FIELDS [OPTIONALLY] ENCLOSED BY character
*

The first character of the FIELDS TERMINATED BY and LINES TERMINATED BY values
*

ASCII 0 (what is actually written following the escape character is ASCII ‘0’, not a zero-valued byte)

If the FIELDS ESCAPED BY character is empty, no characters are escaped and NULL is output as NULL, not \N. It is probably not a good idea to specify an empty escape character, particularly if field values in your data contain any of the characters in the list just given.

The reason for the above is that you must escape any FIELDS TERMINATED BY, ENCLOSED BY, ESCAPED BY, or LINES TERMINATED BY characters to be able to read the file back reliably. ASCII NUL is escaped to make it easier to view with some pagers.

The resulting file does not have to conform to SQL syntax, so nothing else need be escaped.

Here is an example that produces a file in the comma-separated values format used by many programs:

SELECT a,b,a+b INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/result.text'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' OPTIONALLY ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
FROM test_table;

The full page is here:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/select.html

You should be able to take the example at the bottom of that info and put it into mysql either at the command line, or by putting the select query into a PHP/ASP/perl script and pointing a browser at it to trigger it off.