This tool is misnamed: it emits a MySQL CREATE TABLE statement to fit a CSV file.

Usage: csv2sql -t name_of_table -s '\t' < filename.csv

The `-t' option specifies the name of the table to create.

The `-s' option specifies the character to use as a field separator. This may be done in Python's string representation format, which basically means that you can use \t to make a tab character, but beware that backslashes must be quoted to protect them from bash.

The '-i' option allows you to specify that a column should be an integer not a string. You can use this option multiple times, .e.g, -i Age_at_birth -i Age_at_death

csv2sql reads its input from stdin. This means you can do things like:

head -10000 example.csv | csv2sql -t example -s , -i f1 -i f2

Note that MySQL's table/column name quoting rules differ from standard SQL; MySQL (and this tool) by default uses the backtick character: ` to quote table names, not the double quote used in other SQL systems. Use the --quote option to fix this.

If you have a long CSV file which does not have a header line, you can prepend one in bash with (e.g.):

$ (echo "firstname,surname,date_of_birth,image_id,etc" ; cat path_to_file.csv) | ./csv2sql --options

Remember to verify your MySQL LOAD statement when trying to be clever with headers; check that "IGNORE 1 LINES" is present or absent as it needs to be.