>Bob,
>
>APPEND FROM import.txt TYPE DELIMITED WITH ^ WITH CHAR ^
>
>The above did the trick, but I can't work out why ! I read the HELP files several times and never thought about doubling up on the WITH.
>
>Thank for the help.
>

Andrew,

Delimited file terminology is often misused, even by the documentation. A delimited ASCII file has two special characters that appear in the text, the delimiter which is used to delimit character data and the separator which is used to separate fields.

Delimiters appear before and after every character field, while separators appear once between each field and the next. For example;

^Text^,^John^,123.45,^Greate Guy^

is delimited with ^ and the append would be

APPEND FROM ... DELIMITED WITH ^

But the character you are calling the delimiter is actually the separator and that is what the WITH char option allows you to control.

I wish MS would just get off their duff and give us a SEPARATOR option on the APPEND command, it would be so much more clear. Because of this confusion, I prefer to use SDF files for data transfer.