You can set an output mode for SQLite
Via a toot from Ian Jackson, I learnt that SQLite supports different output formats:
The default output mode is list, where values are pipe-separated:
sqlite> .mode list
sqlite> select * from tbl1;
hello!|10
goodbye|20
sqlite>Ian’s toot shows off the box mode, which renders some ASCII boxes:
sqlite> .mode box
sqlite> select * from tbl1;
┌─────────┬─────┐
│ one │ two │
├─────────┼─────┤
│ hello │ 10 │
│ goodbye │ 20 │
└─────────┴─────┘
sqlite>(They look better in my terminal, where the lines are all joined up.)
Perhaps the one I’m most likely to use is line, which prints one column per line – very useful for tables which have lots of columns:
sqlite> .mode line
sqlite> select * from tbl1;
one = hello
two = 10
one = goodbye
two = 20
sqlite>Currently there are 14 different output formats. The others that look interesting are csv, json, html and markdown, which print the data in markup that you can use immediately – I can imagine there might be cases where that might allow me to use the raw output of a SQLite query.