I have been trying to save some old data off of a database, before the database server is decommissioned.  I was hoping to save the data out in a .csv file, but the first problem that I ran into was that some of the columns that I wanted to keep contained carriage returns and newline characters.  When the data was saved out to .csv, the carriage returns and newlines would appear as the end of a record, causing said records to break.  Eventually, I was able to solve that issue.

Once issue was solved, I ran into a new one that took a while (way too long) to figure out.  The problem was, when I would save out a .csv file, I was still getting some records that were broken.  It appeared that there were STILL carriage returns and newlines within my records!

After a fair amount of research, I figured out that iReport itself was adding the offending characters when it was saving the data as a .csv.  Basically, wherever it was adding a page break within the report on the screen, it was adding a carriage return and newline within the .csv file.  Not very handy.  Fortunately, it was an extremely easy problem to solve.  All I needed to do, was set that particular report to not do pagination.

To disable pagination (page breaks) within iReport:

1> Right-click on the report that you want to remove page breaks from and click on “properties”.

2> Scroll down until you find “ignore pagination” and simply check the box.

3> Close the window and you should be ready to go.

What you end up with is one continuous list of records – just like you need for a .csv file.  I used this, along with the previously mentioned replace() function and was able to save out 47.000 individual records fairly cleanly.  Granted, I ran into 15-20 records that were still broken when I tried to import the .csv file into MySQL, but I would consider that a success!

Jeff Eske