Is it possible to modify the output column delimiter in MySQL query results?

Question

Is it possible to modify the string used to delimit output columns in command line MySQL query results? E.g. could I change | to ! or ||?

Answer 1

Yes. From mysql documentation:

[mysql commandline] When used interactively, query results are presented in an ASCII-table format. When used noninteractively (for example, as a filter), the result is presented in tab-separated format. The output format can be changed using command options.

Thus, you can pipe mysql commandlines output to sed and change tabs to whatever you want.

see sed doc: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html#uh-6

also there seems to be a patch to add that option explicitly: http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=8904