Invalid field count in CSV input on line 1 phpmyadmin

Question

I have read many threads but can't find the right specific answer. I get this error message when I try to import additional data into an existing table. The field names are all aligned correctly, but not every row has data in every field. For example, although I have a field named middle_name, not every row has a middle name in it. During the import process, is this blank field not counted as a field and thus throwing off the field count?

I have managed to get most of the data to import by making sure I had a blank column to allow for the auto-increment of ID, as well as leaving the header row in the file but choosing 1 row to skip on the import.

Now the problem is the last row won't import - get error message Invalid format of CSV input on line 19. When I copy the file to Text Wrangler, the last row ends with ,,,,,. This accounts for the last 5 columns which are blank. I need to know what the trick is to get the last row to import.

Here are the settings I have been using:

Answer 1

I’ve had similar problems (with a tab-separated file) after upgrading from an ancient version of phpMyAdmin. The following points might be helpful:

• phpMyAdmin must have he correct number of columns. In older versions of phpMyAdmin you could get away with not supplying empty values for columns at the end of the row, but this is no longer the case.
• If you export an Excel file to text and columns at the start or end of rows are completely empty, Excel will not export blanks for those rows. You need to put something in, or leave blank then edit the resulting file in a text editor with regular expressions, e.g. to add a blank first row, search for ^ and replace with , (CSV file) or \t (tab file); to add two columns to the end search for $ and replace with ,, or \t\t etc.
• Add a blank line to the bottom of the file to avoid the error message referring to the last line of data. This seems to be a bug that has been fixed in newer versions.
• Whilst in the text editor, also check the file encoding as Excel sometimes saves as things like UTF-16 with BOM which phpMyAdmin doesn’t like.

Answer 2

I saw the same error while trying to import a csv file with 20,000 rows into a custom table in Drupal 7 using phpmyadmin. My csv file didn't have headers and had one column with many blanks in it.

What worked for me: I copied the data from Excel into Notepad (a Windows plain text editor) and then back into a new Excel spreadsheet and re-saved it as a csv. I didn't have to add headers and left the blank rows blank. All went fine after I did that.

Answer 3

You'll never have this problem if you keep your 1st row the header row, even if your table already has a header. You can delete the extra header row later.

Why this helps is that, then mysql knows how many cells can possibly contain data, and you wont have to fill in dummy data or edit the csv or any of those things.

Answer 4

I’ve had a similar problem, Then I have tried in Mysql Workbench. table data import through CSV file easily and I have done my work perfectly in MySQL Workbench.

Answer 5

As long as the CSV file you're importing has the proper number of empty columns, it should be no problem for phpMyAdmin (and that looks like it's probably okay based on the group of commas you pasted from your last line).

How was the CSV file generated? Can you open it in a spreadsheet program to verify the line count of row 19?

Is the file exceptionally large? (At 19 rows, I can't imagine it is, but if so you could be hitting PHP resource limits causing early termination of the phpMyAdmin import).

Answer 6

Make sure you are trying to import the table into the database and not the database > table.

I had this same issue, tried all listed and finally realized I needed to go up a level to the database