Sometimes, people ask me for some data in a database so I create the SQL request, but I don’t know how to give the output to that people. I think that most people have Excel, doens’t matter if that’s evil or not, they like to use it, and they find it usefull. That’s why I was searching for a way to output CSV from MySQL or from any SQL client that output result on the term and I found that solution that seems to work pretty well:
mysql the_database -B -e "select some,field from mytable where my_condition = something ;" | sed 's/\t/","/g;s/^/"/;s/$/"/;s/\n//g' > thefile.csv
The file thefile.csv is formatted in csv with correct newlines that excel can read, and that’s it 
benisek said
I totally agree with you! Great blog post.