>>Even when I was doing a lot of VFP TEXTMERGE never seemed intuitive to me. Right now I'm floundering
>>
>>It seems that in order to get a delimited file that works well with a bulk insert to SQL ( i.e. separation with | or something like that and no quotes anywhere ) I need to use TEXTMERGE
>>
>>Is there a better way than to SCAN and build the line using delimited fields inside the TEXTMERGE
>>
>>
>>
>>TEXT TO lcSQL NOSHOW TEXTMERGE
>>
>>SCAN
>>\\<<cid>>|<<name>>|<<address>>|<<balance>>
>>ENDSCAN
>>ENDTEXT
>>
>>
>>
>>Is there a way to get COPY TO to just create a | delimited text file with no quotes for character fields? ( man I hate the way VFP uses "delimiter" where it should be "separator")
>>
>>TIA
>>'
>
>Try
>
>COPY TO 'PipeDelimitedFile.txt' DELIMITED WITH "" WITH CHARACTER '|'
Turned out to be a very good way to go. Table has 2.5 million records. 6 columns had to be transformed from GUID(16) to GUID(32) . First did a SELECT to do the transform then the COPY to to create the text file. That took about 10 seconds all together. Bulk upload on the SQL side took about another 10 seconds.
Charles Hankey
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