MySQL to CSV - separating multiple values - mysql

Question

I have downloaded a MySQL table as CSV, which has over thousand entries of the following type:
id,gender,garment-color
1,male,white
2,"male,female",black
3,female,"red,pink"
Now, when I am trying to create a chart out of this data, it is taking "male" as one value, and "male,female" as a separate value.
So, for the above example, rather than counting 2 "male", and 3 "female", the chart is showing 3 separate categories ("male", "female", "male,female"), with one count each.
I want the output as follows, for chart to have the correct count:
id,gender,garment-color
1,male,white
2,male,black
2,female,black
3,female,red
3,female,pink
The only way I know is to copy the row in MS Excel and adjust the values manually, which is too tedious for 1000+ entries. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

From MySQL command line or whatever tool you are using to send queries to MySQL:
select * from the_table
into outfile '/tmp/out.txt' fields terminated by ',' enclosed by '"'
Then download /tmp/out.txt' from the server and it should be good to go assuming your data is good. If it is not, you might need to massage it with some SQL function use in theselect`.

Answer 2

The csv likely came from a poorly designed/normalized database that had both those values in the same row. You could try using selects and updates, along some built in string functions, on such rows to spawn additional rows containing the additional values and update their original rows to remove those values; but you will have to repeat until all commas are removed (if there is more than one in some field), and will have to determine if a row containing multiple fields with such comma-separated lists need multiplied out (i.e. should 2 gender and 4 color mean 8 rows total).
More likely, you'll probably want to create additional tables for X_garmentcolors, and X_genders; where X is whatever the original table is supposed to be describing. These tables would have an X_id field referencing the original row and a [garmentcolor|gender] value field holding one of the values in the original rows lists. Ideally, they should actually reference [gender|garmentcolor] lookup tables instead of holding actual values; but you'd have to do the grunt work of picking out all the unique colors and genders from your data first. Once that is done, you can do something like:
INSERT INTO X_[garmentcolor|gender] (X_id, Y_id)
SELECT X.X_id, Y.Y_id
FROM originalTable AS X
INNER JOIN valueTable AS Y
ON X.Y_valuelist LIKE CONCAT('%,' Y.value) -- Value at end of list
OR X.Y_valuelist LIKE CONCAT('%,' Y.value, ',%') -- Value in middle of list
OR X.Y_valuelist LIKE CONCAT(Y.value, ',%') -- Value at start of list
OR X.Y_valuelist = Y.value -- Value is entire list
;