mysql table schema to actual table - mysql

Question

I'm very new to databases, so apologies if this is an incredibly stupid quesiton. I was sent the schema of a mysql table in the body of an email. It looks like this, except it has many more rows:
+-------------------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------------------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| _id | varchar(40) | NO | FOO | NULL | |
| foo | text | YES | | NULL | |
| bar | text | YES | | NULL | |
| baz | text | YES | | NULL | |
| qux | datetime | YES | | NULL | |
+-------------------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
I need to create the table locally before reading in the actual data, which is in an accompanying tsv file. I'd rather not create the table schema manually, as it is a lot of columns. Is there a way to do this automatically using the schema that I was sent?

Answer 1

There is no way to automatically convert an ASCII-art table of that form to an SQL CREATE statement.
If you are bored and inclined to do so, I suppose you could write a utility to parse that input and generate an output.
You will either have to create the table with a query (see CREATE), or use an administrative front-end such as phpMyAdmin to enter the information in a more human-friendly manner (I believe phpMyAdmin also now has a graphical designer feature).
Some other DBMS's have table generation tools built in to their front-ends too, e.g. MS SQL Server Management Studio has a nice graphical table builder.
By the way, to pick nits, you mean to say it is a lot of columns, not rows.
Edit: Just for fun, here is a quick Linux shell script that converts most of the informational portion of your table to an SQL statement (command line parameter is input file name):
#!/bin/sh
echo "CREATE TABLE myTable ("
cat "$1" | awk '{ split($0,a,"|"); print a[2] a[3] (match(a[4],"NO")?"NOT NULL":"") " DEFAULT" a[6] ","; }' | tr -s " "
echo ");"
The following input file:
| _id | varchar(40) | NO | FOO | NULL | |
| foo | text | YES | | NULL | |
| bar | text | YES | | NULL | |
| baz | text | YES | | NULL | |
| qux | datetime | YES | | NULL | |
Generates the following output:
CREATE TABLE myTable (
_id varchar(40) NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL ,
foo text DEFAULT NULL ,
bar text DEFAULT NULL ,
baz text DEFAULT NULL ,
qux datetime DEFAULT NULL ,
);
But you still have to remove the foo line manually and replace _id with foo (and the NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL is odd, I don't actually know of MySQL will accept a null default on a not null column). It doesn't care about your KEY column. You also have to manually delete that last comma. It does do most of the work, though.

Answer 2

You could make a start with a good text editor by running through your schema with intelligent replace operations. But in the end it will remain a mainly manual process.