Wow - three super replies at the speed of light: many thanks all.

I thought I'd tried the quote_char option, but perhaps not correctly, and certainly not the whitespace, and didn't appreciate the point about single char. separators.

SQL::Statement looks interesting, especially if it can format "create" and "insert": it was disappointing to find that sqlitebrowser doesn't get any sense out of the mysql dump (from phpmyadmin).

Thanks again!