title: How do I import a whitespace-delimited text file into MySQL?
body: <p>I need to import largish (24MB) text files into a MySQL table. Each line looks like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>1 1 0.008  0  0  0  0  0                                    
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>There are one or more spaces after each field, and the last field is tailed by about 36 spaces before the newline.</p>
  
  <p>How do I import such a file into MySQL? From the documentation it seems that LOAD DATA expects all fields to be terminated by exactly the same string. I have tried</p>
  
  <pre><code>LOAD DATA INFILE 'filename' INTO TABLE mytable FIELDS TERMINATED BY ' ';
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but MySQL will interpret a sequence of more than one space as delimiting an empty field.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>