At first I thought this PR was good for merging, but then I realized that it deviates considerably from #145 .

I think this should be implemented as a [--format=<format>] flag to the existing wp db query:

• stick with using mysql directly, not loading WP for this.
• strip --format=<format> from the arguments that are sent to mysql
• only allow select queries when --format=<format> was specified
• collect results from mysql and then pass them to the requested formatter

Are you up for another stab at this?

This was the part I'm not quite clear on how to implement collect results from mysql and then pass them to the requested formatter which is why I went with this get-rows route. Would the ob_start/ob_get_clean pickup the terminal output from the run_mysql_command() function?

Aha, think I found what's needed, passing descriptors and reading from pipes. Making some progress on this.

Something like this, but it will take an update to the run_mysql_command() in Utils in order to pass an arg to be able to capture the output.

$descriptors = [
	[ 'pipe', 'r' ],
	[ 'pipe', 'w' ],
	[ 'pipe', 'w' ],
];

$run_args = [ 'return_results' => true ];

$results = self::run( '/usr/bin/env mysql --no-defaults --no-auto-rehash --skip-column-names', $assoc_args, $descriptors, $run_args );

$results = array_filter( explode( PHP_EOL, $results ) );

I'll need to get the main wp-cli project setup locally for development in order to submit a PR for the run_mysql_command() update.

@petenelson Looks like you've got ti figured out. Let me know if you need assistance with building something like the above.

This will be greatly simplified by wp-cli/wp-cli#5384.

@petenelson Are you still interested in working on this?

It should be more straight-forward now, I've adapted Utils\ run_mysql_command(), so that if you pass false as the fourth argument, it will return an array with [ $stdout, $sterr, $exit_code ].

Hey @petenelson,

Gentle ping to see if you're still up for giving this another try...

No worries at all if you can't find the time or energy, I would just appreciate knowing about that to decide what to do with the PR.

Probably not right now. I'd need to get all of the development environment up and running again.

Proceeding with wp-cli/wp-cli#5594 for this repository. I've captured this PR to https://gist.github.com/danielbachhuber/6924f9d9aa78fa3b2092943943bf45b7 in case this PR is auto-closed or broken in some way.