sqlite3 is chopping/cutting/truncating my text columns

Question

I have values being cut off and would like to display the full values.

Sqlite3 -column -header locations.dbs "
select n.namelist, f.state, t.state
from names n
left join locations l on l.id = n.id
left join statenames f on f.st = l.st
left join statenames t on t.st = l.stto
where n.timing > 200601 and count(n.timing)<=15"

Which gives me

name        From State   To State  
----------  -----------  ----------
Jack        Connecticut  Louisiana 
Jeff Danie  New Hampshi  New Hampsh

The names are being truncated down to 10 characters or the length of the first row of data, whichever is longer. How can I stop this from happening without making the columns larger than they have to be?

Thanks

Answer 1

There doesn't appear to be a way to make it automatic, but you can use the .width command to manually specify the column widths.

See here (search the section for .width).

Answer 2

you could just use column (the unix command) like this:

sqlite3 -list -separator "|" -header db.dbs "Select ...." | column -t -s "|"

-list and -separator can be omitted, as they are defaults

Answer 3

Expanding on the answer by zuloo, it is possible to use the interactive prompt and have automatic column widths too.

Apart from column you will also need rlwrap (sudo apt-get install rlwrap if you're on Ubuntu). You run it like this:

rlwrap -a -N -c -z pipeto sqlite3 -header locations.dbs

Or you can put an alias in your .bashrc or similar:

alias sqlite="rlwrap -a -N -c -z pipeto sqlite3 -header"

In the sqlite console, you can run your query like this:

select * from names; | column -n -t -s '|'

Or, to make it nicer, put a script somewhere in your $PATH:

#!/bin/bash
column -n -t -s '|'

Let's say it's called pp, don't forget to make it executable with chmod u+x pp. Then you can use the interactive prompt like this:

select * from names; | pp

Answer 4

I was indeed looking for solutions for the exact same issue and I found this workaround:

sqliteresult=`sqlite3 -header -list $SQLITE_FILE "SELECT * ..." | tr "\\n" ";"`
sqliteresult="${sqliteresult/;/;-----------------------------;}"
sqliteresult="${sqliteresult//;/\n}"
sqliteresult="${sqliteresult//|/\t|\t}"
echo -e $sqliteresult

Hoping it helps :)

~Stéphane

Answer 5

Here is another way to format several tables and show the rowid in a nice format.

#/usr/bin/env bash

cli_opts="-header"

for table in "table1" "table2"; do
    select="select rowid as ' ', * from $table;"
    #echo "$select"
    echo "$table"
    sqlite3 $cli_opts database.db "$select" | column -t -s "|"
    echo -e '\n'
done