LOAD DATA Statement Character Escape Sequence \r A carriage return character A tab character. \Z ASCII 26 (Control+Z) \N NULL For more information about  \ -escape syntax, see Section 9.1.1, “String Literals” . If the  FIELDS ESCAPED BY  character is empty, escape-sequence interpretation does not occur. •For output, if the  FIELDS ESCAPED BY  character is not empty, it is used to prefix the following characters on output: •The  FIELDS ESCAPED BY  character. •The  FIELDS [OPTIONALLY] ENCLOSED BY  character. •The first character of the  FIELDS TERMINATED BY  and  LINES TERMINATED BY  values, if the ENCLOSED BY  character is empty or unspecified. •ASCII  0  (what is actually written following the escape character is ASCII  0 , not a zero-valued byte). •If  LINES TERMINATED BY  is an empty string and  FIELDS TERMINATED BY  is nonempty, lines are also terminated with  FIELDS TERMINATED BY . •If the  FIELDS TERMINATED BY  and  FIELDS ENCLOSED BY  values are both empty ( ’’ ), a fixed-row (nondelimited) format is used. With fixed-row format, no delimiters are used between fields (but you can still have a line terminator). Instead, column values are read and written using a field width wide enough to hold all values in the field. For  TINYINT ,  SMALLINT ,  MEDIUMINT ,  INT , and  BIGINT , the field widths are 4, 6, 8, 11, and 20, respectively, no matter what the declared display width is. •For the default  FIELDS  and  LINES  values,  NULL  is written as a field value of  \N  for output, and a field value of  \N  is read as  NULL  for input (assuming that the  ESCAPED BY  character is  \ ). •If  FIELDS ENCLOSED BY  is not empty, a field containing the literal word  NULL  as its value is read as a NULL  value. This differs from the word  NULL  enclosed within  FIELDS ENCLOSED BY  characters, which is read as the string  ’NULL’ . 2646 Handling of  NULL  values varies according to the  FIELDS  and  LINES  options in use: Fixed-size format does not work if you are using a multibyte character set. Note Fixed-row format also affects handling of  NULL  values, as described later. LINES TERMINATED BY  is still used to separate lines. If a line does not contain all fields, the rest of the columns are set to their default values. If you do not have a line terminator, you should set this to  ’’ . In this case, the text file must contain all fields for each row. If the  FIELDS ESCAPED BY  character is empty, no characters are escaped and  NULL  is output as NULL , not  \N . It is probably not a good idea to specify an empty escape character, particularly if field values in your data contain any of the characters in the list just given. In certain cases, field- and line-handling options interact: