Hi David,

If the files are of a reasonably small size, then I'd agree that this is a great way to go. If OTOH they "have ~250 fields and may be huge" then even as few as 100k records blows out to almost 500Mb - My guess is that Fox is going to start paging like crazy on most systems. Writing direct to the disk with LLF or SET TEXT (which is really just LLF wrapped up pretty-like <g>) would work better here IMO. It also saves two sets of I/O (just write rather than write/read/write).

Cheers,

Andrew

>Nadya,
>
>If you want to use COPY TO, try this:
>

>COPY TO dsstemp.txt TYPE DELIMITED WITH "" WITH CHARACTER "~"
>STRTOFILE(STRTRAN(FILETOSTR('dsstemp.txt'), '~', '|^'),'dsstemp.txt')
>MODI FILE dsstemp.txt
>

>
>No fll needed to transform. The DELIMITED WITH "" stops you from having quotes used to wrap text, and the WITH CHARACTER "~" uses that character instead of comma to separate fields (important since without quotes, embedded commas inside strings would confuse things -- I assume you don't have the ~ character in your text). Then the STRTRAN substitutes your two character for the ~.
>
>>Hi everyone,
>>
>>VFP6.0 SP5
>>
>>I have a requirement to create a text file from our database, where delimiters would be |^ (two symbols) and char data would not have quotes. Files have ~250 fields and may be huge.
>>
>>I'm thinking about two possible approaches:
>>1) Scan the file and process it manually (here is a subquestion: do it through textmerge or create chunk string and put this string into file)
>>
>>2) Use copy to command and process the file afterward (Need some fll to make this replacement).
>>
>>What do you think would be better? Does somebody have a similar experience and some benchmarking?
>>
>>Thanks a lot in advance.