>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

It's always a bad idea to #DEFINE reserved words, as you found out the tough way. :-)