I have been looking for this problem since a while so I guess I stuck. Case is: I'm importing a large csv file into mysql database with Bigdump (thanks to A. Ozerov), delimiter is |, all is fine, this works. In my last varchar field the values are usually: '', 'X', '1', '0'. Problem is if I do a select query to this field and look up values with '', I find none or one only. I checked a few lines one by one and found that the phpmyadmin shows a "textarea" instead of a textbox. I went and selected the field data and nothing was there (not even a carriage return). Still I could save the line and reopen it, when the textarea changed to textbox. I wonder if anyone ever saw this error, and if there is a way to fix this database runtime from php (part of daily process), not line-by-line.
I even tried to copy paste both the csv and the database field to text editor to see if a char is there that I don't see.
The data I want to use is: 0 if the value is empty, 1 if the value is anything else. Currently I am not able to separate this two for the above reason.
Thank you in advance!
Check for hexcidecimal values in the column by doing this:
SELECT HEX(columnname)
Then use REPLACE to change the Hex values to Null or ''