How to import load a .sql or .csv file into SQLite?

To import from an SQL file use the following:

sqlite> .read <filename>

To import from a CSV file you will need to specify the file type and destination table:

sqlite> .mode csv <table>
sqlite> .import <filename> <table>

Try doing it from the command like:

cat dump.sql | sqlite3 database.db

This will obviously only work with SQL statements in dump.sql. I'm not sure how to import a CSV.

The sqlite3 .import command won't work for ordinary csv data because it treats any comma as a delimiter even in a quoted string.

This includes trying to re-import a csv file that was created by the shell:

Create table T (F1 integer, F2 varchar);
Insert into T values (1, 'Hey!');
Insert into T values (2, 'Hey, You!');

.mode csv
.output test.csv
select * from T;

Contents of test.csv:
1,Hey!
2,"Hey, You!"

delete from T;

.import test.csv T
Error: test.csv line 2: expected 2 columns of data but found 3

It seems we must transform the csv into a list of Insert statements, or perhaps a different delimiter will work.

Over at SuperUser I saw a suggestion to use LogParser to deal with csv files, I'm going to look into that.

This is how you can insert into an identity column:

CREATE TABLE my_table (id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, name COLLATE NOCASE);
CREATE TABLE temp_table (name COLLATE NOCASE);

.import predefined/myfile.txt temp_table 
insert into my_table (name) select name from temp_table;

myfile.txt is a file in C:\code\db\predefined\

data.db is in C:\code\db\

myfile.txt contains strings separated by newline character.

If you want to add more columns, it's easier to separate them using the pipe character, which is the default.