Formatting the output of an SQL query

Question

I am using the Solaris OS. From Solaris I'm logging into SQL*Plus. My database is Oracle 9i.

I am spooling the output of my query into a file. How can I get it in CSV format so that I can copy it into Excel?

My query is like the follwing.

select name,id,location from employee;

Peter Mortensen · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-04 07:49:35Z

1

I have found a way out of it. We can use concatenation here,

select name,id,location from employee;

gives us 2 different columns, but not in CSV format.

I did

select name||','||id||','||location from employee;

We get the output in a CSV format. It has just concatenated the output with commas (,).

Peter Mortensen

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answered Mar 29, 2010 at 6:50

randeepsp

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1 Comment

Your solution works unless you have commas located in your data. In those instances you will need to double quote the fields.