How can I output MySQL query results in CSV format?

mysql your_database --password=foo < my_requests.sql > out.tsv

This produces a tab-separated format. If you are certain that commas do not appear in any of the column data (and neither do tabs), you can use this pipe command to get a true CSV (thanks to user John Carter):

... .sql | sed 's/\t/,/g' > out.csv

mysql --batch, -B

Print results using tab as the column separator, with each row on a new line. With this option, mysql does not use the history file. Batch mode results in non-tabular output format and escaping of special characters. Escaping may be disabled by using raw mode; see the description for the --raw option.

This will give you a tab-separated file. Since commas (or strings containing comma) are not escaped, it is not straightforward to change the delimiter to comma.

Here's a fairly gnarly way of doing it^[1]:

mysql --user=wibble --password mydatabasename -B -e "select * from vehicle_categories;" | sed "s/'/\'/;s/\t/\",\"/g;s/^/\"/;s/$/\"/;s/\n//g" > vehicle_categories.csv

It works pretty well. Once again, though, a regular expression proves write-only.

Regex Explanation:

• s/// means substitute what's between the first // with what's between the second //
• the "g" at the end is a modifier that means "all instance, not just first"
• ^ (in this context) means beginning of line
• $ (in this context) means end of line

So, putting it all together:

s/'/\'/          Replace ' with \'
s/\t/\",\"/g     Replace all \t (tab) with ","
s/^/\"/          at the beginning of the line place a "
s/$/\"/          At the end of the line, place a "
s/\n//g          Replace all \n (newline) with nothing

^{[1] I found it somewhere and can't take any credit.}

Pipe it through 'tr' (Unix/Cygwin only):

mysql <database> -e "<query here>" | tr '\t' ',' > data.csv

N.B.: This handles neither embedded commas, nor embedded tabs.

This saved me a couple of times. It is fast and it works!

--batch Print results using tab as the column separator, with each row on a new line.

--raw disables character escaping (\n, \t, \0, and \)

Example:

mysql -udemo_user -p -h127.0.0.1 --port=3306 \
   --default-character-set=utf8mb4 --database=demo_database \
   --batch --raw < /tmp/demo_sql_query.sql > /tmp/demo_csv_export.tsv

For completeness you could convert to CSV (but be careful because tabs could be inside field values - e.g., text fields)

tr '\t' ',' < file.tsv > file.csv

The OUTFILE solution given by Paul Tomblin causes a file to be written on the MySQL server itself, so this will work only if you have FILE access, as well as login access or other means for retrieving the file from that box.

If you don't have such access, and tab-delimited output is a reasonable substitute for CSV (e.g., if your end goal is to import to Excel), then serbaut's solution (using mysql --batch and optionally --raw) is the way to go.

MySQL Workbench can export recordsets to CSV, and it seems to handle commas in fields very well. The CSV opens up in OpenOffice Calc fine.

All of the solutions here to date, except the MySQL Workbench one, are incorrect and quite possibly unsafe (i.e., security issues) for at least some possible content in the MySQL database.

MySQL Workbench (and similarly phpMyAdmin) provide a formally correct solution, but they are designed for downloading the output to a user's location. They're not so useful for things like automating data export.

It is not possible to generate reliably correct CSV content from the output of mysql -B -e 'SELECT ...' because that cannot encode carriage returns and white space in fields. The '-s' flag to mysql does do backslash escaping, and might lead to a correct solution. However, using a scripting language (one with decent internal data structures that is, not Bash), and libraries where the encoding issues have already been carefully worked out is far safer.

I thought about writing a script for this, but as soon as I thought about what I'd call it, it occurred to me to search for preexisting work by the same name. While I haven't gone over it thoroughly, mysql2csv looks promising. Depending on your application, the YAML approach to specifying the SQL commands might or might not appeal though. I'm also not thrilled with the requirement for a more recent version of Ruby than comes as standard with my Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) laptop or Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) servers. Yes, I know I could use RVM, but I'd rather not maintain that for such a simple purpose.

Many of the answers on this page are weak, because they don't handle the general case of what can occur in CSV format. E.g., commas and quotes embedded in fields and other conditions that always come up eventually. We need a general solution that works for all valid CSV input data.

Here's a simple and strong solution in Python:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import csv
import sys

tab_in = csv.reader(sys.stdin, dialect=csv.excel_tab)
comma_out = csv.writer(sys.stdout, dialect=csv.excel)

for row in tab_in:
    comma_out.writerow(row)

Name that file tab2csv, put it on your path, give it execute permissions, then use it like this:

mysql OTHER_OPTIONS --batch --execute='select * from whatever;' | tab2csv > outfile.csv

The Python CSV-handling functions cover corner cases for CSV input format(s).

This could be improved to handle very large files via a streaming approach.

Saving to a CSV file on the client

TSV to CSV

From your command line, you can do this:

mysql -h <hostname> -P <port> --database=<db_name> -u <username> -p \
  -e <your SQL query> \
  | sed 's/\t/","/g;s/^/"/;s/$/"/;s/\n//g' \
  > <output_file_name>.csv`

The sed here converts the TSV output into a quoted CSV file. This part of the answer is taken from here.

Handling text output in your values

If your output may contain text with newlines and various other special characters, you should also add these to the pipeline, before the sed above:

  | tr -d '\015' \
  | sed 's/\\n/ /g;s/\\\\/\\/g;s/"/""/g' \

Here the tr removes the \r (CR) characters from the output (Windows new lines inside the texts of the rows) and the sed replaces literal \n, \t with spaces, \\ with a backslash (these literals come from the default mysql cli escaping) and single " with its quoted form - "".

Saving to a CSV file on the server

See this answer for that.

Use:

mysql your_database -p < my_requests.sql | awk '{print $1","$2}' > out.csv

This answer uses Python and a popular third party library, PyMySQL. I'm adding it because Python's csv library is powerful enough to correctly handle many different flavors of .csv and no other answers are using Python code to interact with the database.

import contextlib
import csv
import datetime
import os

# https://github.com/PyMySQL/PyMySQL
import pymysql

SQL_QUERY = """
SELECT * FROM my_table WHERE my_attribute = 'my_attribute';
"""

# embedding passwords in code gets nasty when you use version control
# the environment is not much better, but this is an example
# https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12461484
SQL_USER = os.environ['SQL_USER']
SQL_PASS = os.environ['SQL_PASS']

connection = pymysql.connect(host='localhost',
                             user=SQL_USER,
                             password=SQL_PASS,
                             db='dbname')

with contextlib.closing(connection):
    with connection.cursor() as cursor:
        cursor.execute(SQL_QUERY)
        # Hope you have enough memory :)
        results = cursor.fetchall()

output_file = 'my_query-{}.csv'.format(datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d'))
with open(output_file, 'w', newline='') as csvfile:
    # http://stackoverflow.com/a/17725590/2958070 about lineterminator
    csv_writer = csv.writer(csvfile, lineterminator='\n')
    csv_writer.writerows(results)

I encountered the same problem and Paul's Answer wasn't an option since it was Amazon RDS. Replacing the tab with the commas did not work as the data had embedded commas and tabs. I found that mycli, which is a drop-in alternative for the mysql-client, supports CSV output out of the box with the --csv flag:

mycli db_name --csv -e "select * from flowers" > flowers.csv

Also, if you're performing the query on the Bash command line, I believe the tr command can be used to substitute the default tabs to arbitrary delimiters.

$ echo "SELECT * FROM Table123" | mysql Database456 | tr "\t" ,

This is simple, and it works on anything without needing batch mode or output files:

select concat_ws(',',
    concat('"', replace(field1, '"', '""'), '"'),
    concat('"', replace(field2, '"', '""'), '"'),
    concat('"', replace(field3, '"', '""'), '"'))

from your_table where etc;

Explanation:

1. Replace " with "" in each field --> replace(field1, '"', '""')
2. Surround each result in quotation marks --> concat('"', result1, '"')
3. Place a comma between each quoted result --> concat_ws(',', quoted1, quoted2, ...)

That's it!

You can have a MySQL table that uses the CSV engine.

Then you will have a file on your hard disk that will always be in a CSV format which you could just copy without processing it.

To expand on previous answers, the following one-liner exports a single table as a tab-separated file. It's suitable for automation, exporting the database every day or so.

mysql -B -D mydatabase -e 'select * from mytable'

Conveniently, we can use the same technique to list out MySQL's tables, and to describe the fields on a single table:

mysql -B -D mydatabase -e 'show tables'

mysql -B -D mydatabase -e 'desc users'

Field   Type    Null    Key Default Extra
id  int(11) NO  PRI NULL    auto_increment
email   varchar(128)    NO  UNI NULL    
lastName    varchar(100)    YES     NULL    
title   varchar(128)    YES UNI NULL    
userName    varchar(128)    YES UNI NULL    
firstName   varchar(100)    YES     NULL    

Building on user7610, here is the best way to do it. With mysql outfile there were 60 mins of file ownership and overwriting problems.

It's not cool, but it worked in 5 mins.

php csvdump.php localhost root password database tablename > whatever-you-like.csv

<?php

$server = $argv[1];
$user = $argv[2];
$password = $argv[3];
$db = $argv[4];
$table = $argv[5];

mysql_connect($server, $user, $password) or die(mysql_error());
mysql_select_db($db) or die(mysql_error());

// fetch the data
$rows = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM ' . $table);
$rows || die(mysql_error());


// create a file pointer connected to the output stream
$output = fopen('php://output', 'w');

// output the column headings

$fields = [];
for($i = 0; $i < mysql_num_fields($rows); $i++) {
    $field_info = mysql_fetch_field($rows, $i);
    $fields[] = $field_info->name;
}
fputcsv($output, $fields);

// loop over the rows, outputting them
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($rows)) fputcsv($output, $row);

?>

Here's what I do:

echo $QUERY | \
  mysql -B  $MYSQL_OPTS | \
  perl -F"\t" -lane 'print join ",", map {s/"/""/g; /^[\d.]+$/ ? $_ : qq("$_")} @F ' | \
  mail -s 'report' person@address

The Perl script (snipped from elsewhere) does a nice job of converting the tab spaced fields to CSV.

Not exactly as a CSV format, but the tee command from the MySQL client can be used to save the output into a local file:

tee foobar.txt
SELECT foo FROM bar;

You can disable it using notee.

The problem with SELECT … INTO OUTFILE …; is that it requires permission to write files at the server.

In my case from table_name ..... before INTO OUTFILE ..... gives an error:

Unexpected ordering of clauses. (near "FROM" at position 10)

What works for me:

SELECT *
INTO OUTFILE '/Volumes/Development/sql/sql/enabled_contacts.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ','
ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'
FROM table_name
WHERE column_name = 'value'

What worked for me:

SELECT *
FROM students
WHERE foo = 'bar'
LIMIT 0,1200000
INTO OUTFILE './students-1200000.csv'
FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ESCAPED BY '"'
ENCLOSED BY '"'
LINES TERMINATED BY '\r\n';

None of the solutions on this thread worked for my particular case. I had pretty JSON data inside one of the columns, which would get messed up in my CSV output. For those with a similar problem, try lines terminated by \r\n instead.

Also another problem for those trying to open the CSV with Microsoft Excel, keep in mind there is a limit of 32,767 characters that a single cell can hold, above that it overflows to the rows below. To identify which records in a column have the issue, use the query below. You can then truncate those records or handle them as you'd like.

SELECT id,name,CHAR_LENGTH(json_student_description) AS 'character length'
FROM students
WHERE CHAR_LENGTH(json_student_description)>32767;

Using the solution posted by Tim Harding, I created this Bash script to facilitate the process (root password is requested, but you can modify the script easily to ask for any other user):

#!/bin/bash

if [ "$1" == "" ];then
    echo "Usage: $0 DATABASE TABLE [MYSQL EXTRA COMMANDS]"
    exit
fi

DBNAME=$1
TABLE=$2
FNAME=$1.$2.csv
MCOMM=$3

echo "MySQL password: "
stty -echo
read PASS
stty echo

mysql -uroot -p$PASS $MCOMM $DBNAME -B -e "SELECT * FROM $TABLE;" | sed "s/'/\'/;s/\t/\",\"/g;s/^/\"/;s/$/\"/;s/\n//g" > $FNAME

It will create a file named: database.table.csv

If you have PHP set up on the server, you can use mysql2csv to export an (actually valid) CSV file for an arbitrary MySQL query. See my answer at MySQL - SELECT * INTO OUTFILE LOCAL ? for a little more context/info.

I tried to maintain the option names from mysql so it should be sufficient to provide the --file and --query options:

./mysql2csv --file="/tmp/result.csv" --query='SELECT 1 as foo, 2 as bar;' --user="username" --password="password"

"Install" mysql2csv via

wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/paslandau/37bf787eab1b84fc7ae679d1823cf401/raw/29a48bb0a43f6750858e1ddec054d3552f3cbc45/mysql2csv -O mysql2csv -q && (sha256sum mysql2csv | cmp <(echo "b109535b29733bd596ecc8608e008732e617e97906f119c66dd7cf6ab2865a65  mysql2csv") || (echo "ERROR comparing hash, Found:" ;sha256sum mysql2csv) ) && chmod +x mysql2csv

(Download content of the gist, check checksum and make it executable.)

The following produces tab-delimited and valid CSV output. Unlike most of the other answers, this technique correctly handles escaping of tabs, commas, quotes, and new lines without any stream filter like sed, AWK, or tr.

The example shows how to pipe a remote MySQL table directly into a local SQLite database using streams. This works without FILE permission or SELECT INTO OUTFILE permission. I have added new lines for readability.

mysql -B -C --raw -u 'username' --password='password' --host='hostname' 'databasename'
-e 'SELECT
    CONCAT('\''"'\'',REPLACE(`id`,'\''"'\'', '\''""'\''),'\''"'\'') AS '\''id'\'',
    CONCAT('\''"'\'',REPLACE(`value`,'\''"'\'', '\''""'\''),'\''"'\'') AS '\''value'\''
    FROM sampledata'
2>/dev/null | sqlite3 -csv -separator $'\t' mydb.db '.import /dev/stdin mycsvtable'

The 2>/dev/null is needed to suppress the warning about the password on the command line.

If your data has NULLs, you can use the IFNULL() function in the query.

A simple solution in Python that writes a standard-format CSV file with headers and writes data as a stream (low memory use):

import csv

def export_table(connection, table_name, output_filename):
    cursor = connection.cursor()
    cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM " + table_name)

    # thanks to https://gist.github.com/madan712/f27ac3b703a541abbcd63871a4a56636 for this hint
    header = [descriptor[0] for descriptor in cursor.description]

    with open(output_filename, 'w') as csvfile:
        csv_writer = csv.writer(csvfile, dialect='excel')
        csv_writer.writerow(header)
        for row in cursor:
            csv_writer.writerow(row)

You could use it like:

import mysql.connector as mysql
# (or https://github.com/PyMySQL/PyMySQL should work but I haven't tested it)

db = mysql.connect(
    host="localhost",
    user="USERNAME",
    db="DATABASE_NAME",
    port=9999)

for table_name in ['table1', 'table2']:
    export_table(db, table_name, table_name + '.csv')

db.close()

For simplicity, this intentionally doesn't include some fancier stuff from another answer like using an environment variable for credentials, contextlib, etc. There is a subtlety mentioned there about line endings that I haven't evaluated.

This is dirty and ugly. It is only suitable for the particular situation where all you have is a PHP-*-admin and the server is running with the --secure-file-priv option, so then you cannot use the INTO OUTFILE '/path/to/export.csv' clause in your query.

What you can do is parse lines of CSV with ... wait for it!, CONCAT, then copy the results and paste them into a file.

Here's an example, where I needed SQL format (it'd be trivial to adapt it for CSV):

SELECT CONCAT(
"('",
`username`, "', '",
`password`, "', '",
`first_name`, "', '",
`last_name`, "', '",
`gender`, "'),"
) AS `row` 
FROM `users`
WHERE `role` != 'Not set'
AND `user_status` = 'Active'
ORDER BY `role`, `gender`, `user_id`
LIMIT 200

That gives nice, ready for import output similar to this:

('jane', '3d7ff...', 'Jane', 'Doe', 'Female'),  
('john', 'd2a33...', 'John', 'Doe', 'Male'),
...

Tiny Bash script for doing simple query to CSV dumps, inspired by Tim Harding's answer.

#!/bin/bash

# $1 = query to execute
# $2 = outfile
# $3 = mysql database name
# $4 = mysql username

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Query not given"
    exit 1
fi

if [ -z "$2" ]; then
    echo "Outfile not given"
    exit 1
fi

MYSQL_DB=""
MYSQL_USER="root"

if [ ! -z "$3" ]; then
    MYSQL_DB=$3
fi

if [ ! -z "$4" ]; then
    MYSQL_USER=$4
fi

if [ -z "$MYSQL_DB" ]; then
    echo "Database name not given"
    exit 1
fi

if [ -z "$MYSQL_USER" ]; then
    echo "Database user not given"
    exit 1
fi

mysql -u $MYSQL_USER -p -D $MYSQL_DB -B -s -e "$1" | sed "s/'/\'/;s/\t/\",\"/g;s/^/\"/;s/$/\"/;s/\n//g" > $2
echo "Written to $2"

If you are getting an error of secure-file-priv then, also after shifting your destination file location inside the C:\ProgramData\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0\Uploads and also after then the query -

SELECT * FROM attendance INTO OUTFILE 'C:\ProgramData\MySQL\MySQL Server 8.0\Uploads\FileName.csv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';

is not working, you have to just change \(backsplash) from the query to / (forwardsplash)

And that works!!

Example:

SELECT * FROM attendance INTO OUTFILE 'C:/ProgramData/MySQL/MySQL Server 8.0/Uploads/FileName.csv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY ',' ENCLOSED BY '"' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n';

Each time when you run the successful query, it will generate the new CSV file each time! Cool, right?