Hello all,

Yesterday I got stumped by this one.

Something as simple as

Append From invoices.txt TYPE DELIMITED WITH TAB

simply wasn't working.

I'd run the program and get a "Command contains unrecognized phrase/keyword." message.

It was particularly puzzling because an Append command is probably as simple and straight-forward as they get.

The syntax was all perfect, so I started considering things like data corrupted in such a way that vfp would choke and not even get the error message right.

To further complicate things, I was able to run this in the command window without any problems, which then led me to think about a bug (great, just in time for sp1).

After about an hour of tinkering and digging here in the archives I managed to solve the problem.

I'm posting it here so that others bitten by similar problem don't have to spend the time.

The problem lied in an #include file. In it, I had the following:

#define TAB  chr(9)

so my

Append From invoices.txt TYPE DELIMITED WITH TAB

was being interpreted as

Append From invoices.txt TYPE DELIMITED WITH chr(9)

which is syntactically wrong.

Workaround:

lcCommand = "Append From invoices.txt TYPE DELIMITED WITH TAB"
&lcCommand

Have fun!

Alex