I have some sensitive information that I need to import into SQL Server that is proving to be a challenge. I'm not sure what the original database that housed this information was, but I do know it is provided to us in a Unix fixed length text file with LF row terminator. I have two files: a small file that covers a month's worth of data, and a much larger file that covers 5 years worth of data. I have created a BCP format file and command that successfully imports and maps the data to my SQL Server table.
The 5 year data is supposedly in the same format, so I've used the same command and format file on the text file. It starts processing some records, but somewhere in the processing (after several thousand records), it throws Unexpected EOF encountered and I can see in the database some of the rows are mapped correctly according to the fixed lengths, but then something goes horribly wrong and screws up by inserting parts of data in columns they most definitely do not belong in. Is there a character that would cause BCP to mess up and terminate early?
BCP Command: BCP DBTemp.dbo.svc_data_temp in C:\Test\data2.txt -f C:\test\txt2.fmt -T -r "0x0A" -S "stageag,90000" -e log.rtf
Again, format file and command work perfectly for the the smaller data set, but something in the 5 year dataset is screwing up BCP.
Thanks in advance for the replies!
So I found the offending characters in my fixed width file. Somehow whoever pulled the data originally (I don't have access to the source), escaped (or did not escape correctly) the double quotes in some of the text, resulting in some injection of extra spaces breaking the fixed width guidelines we were supposed to be following. After correcting the double quotes by hex editing the file, BCP was able to process all records using the format file without issue. I had used the -F and -L flags to examine certain rows of the data and to narrow it down to where I could visually compare the rows that were ok and the rows where the problems started to arise, which led me to discover the double quotes issue. Hope his helps for somebody else if they have an issue similar to this!
Related
I have a large flat file I'm using to recover data. It was exported from a system using double quotes " as the qualifier and a pipe | a the delimiter. SSIS can be configured to this without a problem, but where I'm running into issues is with the \ escape char.
the row causing the issue:
"125004267"|"125000316"|"125000491"|"height"|"5' 11\""|"12037"|"46403"|""|"t"|""|"2012-10-01 22:34:01"|"2012-10-01 22:34:01"|"1900-01-01 00:00:00"
The fourth column in the database should be 5' 11".
I'm getting the following error:
Error: 0xC0202055 at Data Flow Task 1, Flat File Source [2]: The column delimiter for column "posting_value" was not found.
How can I tell SSIS to handle the \ escape character?
I know this is quite old, but I just ran into a similar issue regarding escaping quotes in CSV's in SSIS. It seems odd there isn't more flexible support for this but it does support VB-style double-double quotes. So in your example you could pre-parse the file to translate it into
"125004267"|"125000316"|"125000491"|"height"|"5' 11"""|"12037"|"46403"|""|"t"|""|"2012-10-01 22:34:01"|"2012-10-01 22:34:01"|"1900-01-01 00:00:00"
to get your desired output. This at least works on Sql Server 2014.
This also works for Excel (tested with 2010). Though, oddly, only when inserting data from a text file, not when opening a CSV with Excel.
This does appear to be the standardized method according to RFC 4180
which states
Fields containing line breaks (CRLF), double quotes, and commas
should be enclosed in double-quotes
...
If double-quotes are used to enclose fields, then a double-quote
appearing inside a field must be escaped by preceding it with
another double quote.
This probably isn't the answer you are looking for, but...
I'd reach out to the technical contacts of the source of data, and explain to them that if they're going to send you a file that uses double-quotes as text qualifiers, then that implies that there are never any double-quotes in the text. If that is possible, as it happens here, tell them to use another text qualifier, or none at all.
Since there are pipe delimeters in use, what's the point of having text qualifiers?
Seems redundant.
I try to do a bulk copy from a file into a table in sqlserver 2008. Its only a part of the file that I want to copy (in the BCP command example bellow it is only line number 3 I will copy).
Sometimes I receive the "Unexpected EOF encountered" error message.
The command is:
BCP tblBulkCopyTest in d:\bc_file.txt -F3 -L3 -c -t, -S(local) -Utest -Ptest
When the file looks like the following, the copy works fine (the line number 3 is inserted into my table):
44261233,207,0,0,2168
44261234,207,0,0,2570
44261235,207,0,0,2572
When the file looks like the following, I receive "Unexpected EOF encountered" error message:
Test
44261233,207,0,0,2168
44261234,207,0,0,2570
44261235,207,0,0,2572
It seems like when the file starts with something not in the correct format, the BCP command fails, even though it is not the line I want to copy (in the bcp command I have specified line number 3).
When the file looks like the following, the copy works fine:
44261233,207,0,0,2168
44261234,207,0,0,2570
44261235,207,0,0,2572
Test
So it is only when the file has some incorrect data "before" the lines I want to copy, that I receive the error.
Any suggestions how the BCP command will ignore the lines, not in question?
The way I solve that kind of errors every day:
1) Create a table with single column tblRawBulk(RawRow varchar(1000)).
2) Insert all of the rows there.
3) Remove unnecessary unformatted rows (e.g. 'test' in your example) with WHERE-parameter. Or even remove all unnecessary rows (except of rows, that you need to load) to simplify point 5.
4) Upload this table with BCP to some workfolder.
5) Download this new file.
It's no exact what you want, but may help if you'll write corresponding stored procedure, that can automatically do all this things.
I'm working on a project where I have to parse a bunch of .csv files, all of different formats and containing different kinds of data through some C++ functions. After that I extract data from the files and create a .sql file that can be imported in psql to insert the data into a PostgreSQL database at a later stage.
But I am not able to figure out the correct syntax for the .sql file. Here is a sample table and a sample .sql file reproducing the same errors I am getting:
Table Creation Code:
CREATE TABLE "Sample_Table"
(
"Col_ID" integer NOT NULL,
"Col_Message" character varying(50),
CONSTRAINT "Sample_Table_pkey" PRIMARY KEY ("Col_ID" )
)
insertion.sql (after the copy line, fields separated by a single tab character)
copy Sample_Table (Col_ID, Col_Message) from stdin;
1 This is Spaaarta
2 Why So Serious
3 Baazinga
\.
Now if I execute the above sql file, I get the following error:
ERROR: syntax error at or near "1"
LINE 2: 1 This is Spaaarta
^
********** Error **********
If it can help, I'm running a PostgreSQL 9.1 release, and all the above queries were executed through PGAdmin III Software.
PgAdmin doesn't support executing COPY commands in the same way that psql does (or at least, it didn't the last time I tried it with version 1.14). Use psql to execute the script, or use INSERT statements.
Three things to check:
Is there actually exactly one tab characters between the columns? Spaces are a no-go.
Are there more error messages? I'm missing at least one. (See below)
When you force case sensitive table and column names you have to do this consequently. Therefore you must write this:
copy "Sample_Table" ("Col_ID", "Col_Message") from stdin;
Otherwise you will get theese errors:
psql:x.sql:1: ERROR: relation "sample_table" does not exist
psql:x.sql:5: invalid command \.
psql:x.sql:5: ERROR: syntax error at or near "1"
LINE 1: 1 This is Spaaarta
^
With these things in place I can use your example data successfully.
EDIT Bug change: The questioner now has
ERROR: invalid input syntax for integer: "1 'This is Spaaarta'"
So something with the 1 is not OK.
My guess is, that this is an encoding problem. Windows with it's UTF-16 stuff might be the culprit here.
Debugging these kind of problems other the web is not easy, because to many semi-intelligent programs are in the line, most of them like to adjust "a few" things.
But first check a few things in psql:
\encoding
show client_encoding;
show server_encoding;
According to the pastebin data these should be the same and one of "SQL_ASCII", "LATIN1" or "UTF-8".
If they already are or if adjusting them does not help: Unix/Linux/cygwin has a hexdump -C x.sql program, post its output to pastebin. DO NOT USE the hexdump from any Windows editor like ultraedit - they have fooled me several times. When transferring the file to Linux be sure to use binary transfer.
I'm not certain when this first occured.
I have a new drop-shipping affiliate website, and receive an exported copy of the product catalog from the wholesaler. I format and import this into Prestashop 1.4.4.
The front end of the website contains combinations of strange characters inside product text: Ã, Ã, ¢, â‚ etc. They appear in place of common characters like , - : etc.
These characters are present in about 40% of the database tables, not just product specific tables like ps_product_lang.
Another website thread says this same problem occurs when the database connection string uses an incorrect character encoding type.
In /config/setting.inc, there is no character encoding string mentioned, just the MySQL Engine, which is set to InnoDB, which matches what I see in PHPMyAdmin.
I exported ps_product_lang, replaced all instances of these characters with correct characters, saved the CSV file in UTF-8 format, and reimported them using PHPMyAdmin, specifying UTF-8 as the language.
However, after doing a new search in PHPMyAdmin, I now have about 10 times as many instances of these bad characters in ps_product_lang than I started with.
If the problem is as simple as specifying the correct language attribute in the database connection string, where/how do I set this, and what to?
Incidently, I tried running this command in PHPMyAdmin mentioned in this thread, but the problem remains:
SET NAMES utf8
UPDATE: PHPMyAdmin says:
MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
This is the same character set I used in the last import file, which caused more character corruptions. UTF-8 was specified as the charset of the import file during the import process.
UPDATE2
Here is a sample:
people are truly living untetheredâ€ïâ€Â
Ã‚ï† buying and renting movies online, downloading software, and
sharing and storing files on the web.
UPDATE3
I ran an SQL command in PHPMyAdmin to display the character sets:
character_set_client utf8
character_set_connection utf8
character_set_database latin1
character_set_filesystem binary
character_set_results utf8
character_set_server latin1
character_set_system utf8
So, perhaps my database needs to be converted (or deleted and recreated) to UTF-8. Could this pose a problem if the MySQL server is latin1?
Can MySQL handle the translation of serving content as UTF8 but storing it as latin1? I don't think it can, as UTF8 is a superset of latin1. My web hosting support has not replied in 48 hours. Might be too hard for them.
If the charset of the tables is the same as it's content try to use mysql_set_charset('UTF8', $link_identifier). Note that MySQL uses UTF8 to specify the UTF-8 encoding instead of UTF-8 which is more common.
Check my other answer on a similar question too.
This is surely an encoding problem. You have a different encoding in your database and in your website and this fact is the cause of the problem. Also if you ran that command you have to change the records that are already in your tables to convert those character in UTF-8.
Update: Based on your last comment, the core of the problem is that you have a database and a data source (the CSV file) which use different encoding. Hence you can convert your database in UTF-8 or, at least, when you get the data that are in the CSV, you have to convert them from UTF-8 to latin1.
You can do the convertion following this articles:
Convert latin1 to UTF8
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/convert-latin1-to-utf-8
This appears to be a UTF-8 encoding issue that may have been caused by a double-UTF8-encoding of the database file contents.
This situation could happen due to factors such as the character set that was or was not selected (for instance when a database backup file was created) and the file format and encoding database file was saved with.
I have seen these strange UTF-8 characters in the following scenario (the description may not be entirely accurate as I no longer have access to the database in question):
As I recall, there the database and tables had a "uft8_general_ci" collation.
Backup is made of the database.
Backup file is opened on Windows in UNIX file format and with ANSI encoding.
Database is restored on a new MySQL server by copy-pasting the contents from the database backup file into phpMyAdmin.
Looking into the file contents:
Opening the SQL backup file in a text editor shows that the SQL backup file has strange characters such as "sÃ¥". On a side note, you may get different results if opening the same file in another editor. I use TextPad here but opening the same file in SublimeText said "så" because SublimeText correctly UTF8-encoded the file -- still, this is a bit confusing when you start trying to fix the issue in PHP because you don't see the right data in SublimeText at first. Anyways, that can be resolved by taking note of which encoding your text editor is using when presenting the file contents.
The strange characters are double-encoded UTF-8 characters, so in my case the first "Ã" part equals "Ã" and "Â¥" = "¥" (this is my first "encoding"). THe "Ã¥" characters equals the UTF-8 character for "å" (this is my second encoding).
So, the issue is that "false" (UTF8-encoded twice) utf-8 needs to be converted back into "correct" utf-8 (only UTF8-encoded once).
Trying to fix this in PHP turns out to be a bit challenging:
utf8_decode() is not able to process the characters.
// Fails silently (as in - nothing is output)
$str = "så";
$str = utf8_decode($str);
printf("\n%s", $str);
$str = utf8_decode($str);
printf("\n%s", $str);
iconv() fails with "Notice: iconv(): Detected an illegal character in input string".
echo iconv("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1", "så");
Another fine and possible solution fails silently too in this scenario
$str = "så";
echo html_entity_decode(htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'), ENT_QUOTES , 'ISO-8859-15');
mb_convert_encoding() silently: #
$str = "så";
echo mb_convert_encoding($str, 'ISO-8859-15', 'UTF-8');
// (No output)
Trying to fix the encoding in MySQL by converting the MySQL database characterset and collation to UTF-8 was unsuccessfully:
ALTER DATABASE myDatabase CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
ALTER TABLE myTable CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;
I see a couple of ways to resolve this issue.
The first is to make a backup with correct encoding (the encoding needs to match the actual database and table encoding). You can verify the encoding by simply opening the resulting SQL file in a text editor.
The other is to replace double-UTF8-encoded characters with single-UTF8-encoded characters. This can be done manually in a text editor. To assist in this process, you can manually pick incorrect characters from Try UTF-8 Encoding Debugging Chart (it may be a matter of replacing 5-10 errors).
Finally, a script can assist in the process:
$str = "så";
// The two arrays can also be generated by double-encoding values in the first array and single-encoding values in the second array.
$str = str_replace(["Ã","Â¥"], ["Ã","¥"], $str);
$str = utf8_decode($str);
echo $str;
// Output: "så" (correct)
I encountered today quite a similar problem : mysqldump dumped my utf-8 base encoding utf-8 diacritic characters as two latin1 characters, although the file itself is regular utf8.
For example : "é" was encoded as two characters "é". These two characters correspond to the utf8 two bytes encoding of the letter but it should be interpreted as a single character.
To solve the problem and correctly import the database on another server, I had to convert the file using the ftfy (stands for "Fixes Text For You). (https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/python-ftfy) python library. The library does exactly what I expect : transform bad encoded utf-8 to correctly encoded utf-8.
For example : This latin1 combination "é" is turned into an "é".
ftfy comes with a command line script but it transforms the file so it can not be imported back into mysql.
I wrote a python3 script to do the trick :
#!/usr/bin/python3
# coding: utf-8
import ftfy
# Set input_file
input_file = open('mysql.utf8.bad.dump', 'r', encoding="utf-8")
# Set output file
output_file = open ('mysql.utf8.good.dump', 'w')
# Create fixed output stream
stream = ftfy.fix_file(
input_file,
encoding=None,
fix_entities='auto',
remove_terminal_escapes=False,
fix_encoding=True,
fix_latin_ligatures=False,
fix_character_width=False,
uncurl_quotes=False,
fix_line_breaks=False,
fix_surrogates=False,
remove_control_chars=False,
remove_bom=False,
normalization='NFC'
)
# Save stream to output file
stream_iterator = iter(stream)
while stream_iterator:
try:
line = next(stream_iterator)
output_file.write(line)
except StopIteration:
break
Apply these two things.
You need to set the character set of your database to be utf8.
You need to call the mysql_set_charset('utf8') in the file where you made the connection with the database and right after the selection of database like mysql_select_db use the mysql_set_charset. That will allow you to add and retrieve data properly in whatever the language.
The error usually gets introduced while creation of CSV. Try using Linux for saving the CSV as a TextCSV. Libre Office in Ubuntu can enforce the encoding to be UTF-8, worked for me.
I wasted a lot of time trying this on Mac OS. Linux is the key. I've tested on Ubuntu.
Good Luck
I'm getting BCP error "Unexpected EOF encountered in BCP data-file" during import, which is probably misleading. I strongly suspect that some field has been added to the table or there's some offending character is in the file.
How would I go about inspecting the contents of .dat file visually?
Are there any good hex viewers where I can quickly try to adjust row length to see the data in tabular manner?
Other suggestions are also appreciated.
I guess it depends on your input format. Is it binary input? if so, it's gonna be hard. I use visual studio to open a file in the binary viewer but it's far from easy. The usual suspects are CRLF's in a text field or text that contains your field delimiter or EOL character.