>>The problem is that there is not a clear definition of what constitutes a new column value. I would suggest at the source either delimiting with a different character (perhaps TAB or pipe | symbol). I don't use commas as the separator as this has the problem you are now having.
>>
>>Another suggestion is to use an XML formatted file for the data.
>
>Up until a few months ago, they were sending us the files in SDF format. Life was happy. Then they changed the format, and did not tell us. The application was failing, but not reporting the failure. It was only when started getting reports that the information in our database was out-of-date, that we noticed that the format had changed.
>I have put in a request with my bosses to talk to the source about the file format.

Argh.

Yes this will be the result of sdf - it just reads characters

Can you talk them do use different delimiter (we are happy with | for that) or enclose any character in something like " "? And import not as CSV but as DELIMITED. This is not fail save, but better then pure CSV. We have skipped comma because from time to time somebody forget to switch number format. German numbers use decimal comma (3,1415926) so it was fun anyway. And this was much more ugly to parse out since numbers normaly will not be enclosed in " ".