I'm not aware of a method to set an arbitrary hex value for a field or record separator (though I could swear that strings were acceptable as separators in some ancient version of the CLI -- maybe I just dream in sqlite.) I don't know if .mode ascii would be of any use to you. It's described as: "Columns/rows delimited by 0x1F and 0x1E" A hack might be to use the CLI's file functions to read the import file into a single blob field in a temporary 1-row table, perform a REPLACE or two, then write it back out as your new import file. [](https://sqlite.org/cli.html#file_i_o_functions) Someone here may have a better answer.