Exporting data from SQL Server Express to CSV (need quoting and escaping)

Question

I\'ve spent 2 days trying to export a 75,000 row table containing a large text field of user input data from a SQL server installation. This data contains every plain ascii

Answer 1

I've been trying to figure this out as well. Not sure if this will work for you since your table is much larger than mine, but this is what I did just out of a whim:

1. I pulled up my table in Express by doing a SELECT * statement
2. Simply selected the resulting rows and Ctrl + C
3. Opened Excel
4. Highlighted the amount of columns the table I was pasting had
5. Pasted, and it friggin' worked!
6. Now just have to Export Excel as CSV and done.

I know it probably sounds stupid, but it actually worked for me.

Answer 2

We made a small script to convert SSMS "broken" CSV into proper CSV, find it in this answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/46876236/1532201

Answer 3

Here's the essence of a script I use to do just this:

require 'rubygems'
require 'active_record'
require 'tiny_tds'
require 'activerecord-sqlserver-adapter'
require 'acts_as_reportable'
require 'ruport'

ActiveRecord::Base.logger = Logger.new("log/debug.log")
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
  :adapter    => 'sqlserver',
  :mode       => 'dblib',
  :dataserver => 'servername',
  :username   => 'username',
  :password   => 'password',
  :timeout    => '60000'
)

class Table1 < ActiveRecord::Base
  set_table_name 'table_name'
  set_primary_key 'table_id'
  acts_as_reportable
end

Table1.report_table(:all).save_as("finished/table1.csv")

Hope it helps!

Answer 4

It can be done! However you have to specifically configure SSMS to use quoted output, because for some daft reason it is not the default.

In the query window you want to save go to Query -> Query Options...

Check the box "quote strings containing list separators when saving .csv results".

then

select 'apple,banana,cookie' as col1,1324 as col2,'one two three' as col3,'a,b,"c",d' as col4

will output

col1,col2,col3,col4
"apple,banana,cookie",1324,one two three,"a,b,""c"",d"

which is what we all want.