I have a sample file that contains entries like:

age=24 gender=male height=63 weight=180 eyecolor=blue haircolor=blonde
age=21 gender=female height=52 weight=140 eyecolor=hazel haircolor=brown
age=27 gender=female height=48 weight=127 eyecolor=brown haircolor=black

etc.

I know how to handle comma or tab delimited data, but I'm not sure what this format is called. I have a table setup with each variable as a column. In some cases, I may have a sample file that only has some of these variables, or maybe more, and may not have them in the same order. So I cannot rely on the position of this data.

How do I tokenize this, and import it into my table? What is this format called, so I can look up a reference going forward?

I don't know if there is an official name, but I would refer to this as "key/value."

Thanks. With that tidbit, I'm starting to search for "key/value metadata". My results are a closer match than what I was getting before, but I still haven't gotten an example of how to import this into mysql.

My instincts tell me I should probably import each line into a temporary array by tokenizing the key/value pairs by the spaces. Then I would parse the array again to be break the entry into a table, using the = as the delimeter. Then a loop would put each value into each column based on the key (if it exists). Seems like an inefficent brute force though...