Tom,
>I must retreive data from an existing database where they are in both character and memo fields (data-plural, datum-singular), and then export them to a text file while delimited as a character field within each record. The memo data are less than 256 characters in each instance...
You can pull the data into a temporary cursor with a SQL SELECT command, using the PADR() function to transform the memo field into a character-type field of fixed width to assure getting all the data, then output from there to a delimited file.
This will give you just the first 254 chars of the memo, but will work:
field1 C 10
field2 C 10
memofield M
SELECT field1, field2, PADR(memofield,254) AS wasmemo ;
FROM mytable ;
INTO CURSOR temp ;
WHERE field1 = somecondition
COPY TO newfile TYPE DELIMITED