Spaces in column names

Seriously? There's no way to handle a column name with a space? This is going to be a lot of work to clean these legacy tables.

Warning: here be dragons!

To those who come after me: rather than trying to hack things to work with spaces in column names you will be _much_ better off with some simple SQL to convert your legacy table:

    // Convert column names to something usable.
    $columns = db_query('SELECT COLUMN_NAME, DATA_TYPE FROM information_schema.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME = :name', array(':name' => 'legacy_foo'))->fetchAllKeyed();
    $alters = array();
    foreach ($columns as $column => $data_type) {
      $column_clean = strtolower(preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9_]+/', '_', $column));
      switch ($data_type) {
        case 'varchar':
          $column_definition = 'VARCHAR(255)';
          break;
        case 'int':
          $column_definition = 'INT(11)';
          break;
        default:
          $column_definition = $data_type;
      }
      if ($column_clean != $column) {
        $alters[] = "CHANGE `$column` $column_clean $column_definition";
      }
    }
    if ($alters) {
      db_query('ALTER TABLE legacy_foo ' . implode(', ', $alters));
    }

Same problem here. I've removed whitespace as a workaround, but Drupal should support access to valid MySQL column names. Yes, this is already a Drupal core issue: #1426084: Provide backtick escaping for MySQL in DB abstraction layer

From https://drupal.org/node/1426084#comment-6467210, here is a solution for the problem of needing backticks:

$query = Database::getConnection('default', 'joomla_migrate')
->select('jos_content', 'jc')
->fields('jc', array('id', 'title', 'introtext', 'created', 'modified'));
$query->addExpression('`fulltext`', 'full');

Added to docs: https://drupal.org/node/2050819