Producing HTML output

The mysql command-line client has several different output options. One of these is HTML.

Getting ready

Import the ISFDB database as described in the Importing the data exported by mysqldump recipe in this chapter. Create a file called isfdb-001.sql using the following command line:

SELECT * FROM authors LIMIT 100;

We could put whatever commands we want in this file, or give it a different name, but this works for the purposes of this recipe.

How to do it...

1. Open a terminal and navigate to where we saved the isfdb-001.sql file.

2. Issue the following command on the command line (not from within the mysql command-line client, but by calling the client with some special options):

   mysql --html isfdb < isfdb-001.sql > isfdb-001.html
   

3. Execute either a dir or ls command and we'll see that now there is a file named isfdb-001.html in the directory.

4. We can now either open the newly created isfdb-001.html file in our favorite text editor, or view it in a web browser, such as Firefox...