Thank you for your response. As soon as I posted my message I realized that I should have noted that I use VFP 6. I found an interesting MSDN article on the Web that discusses the issue in general. Nothing suggests that I can do this in VFP 6 though.

>Hi Dennis,
>
>>Is it possible, via the COPY TO command, to export a table to a pipe-delimited text file that does *not* have quotes around the character fields? Some documentation indicates that it is possible. I never thought it was possible.
>
>It's now possible in VFP 7

COPY TO mytxt.txt DELIMITED WITH "" WITH CHARACTER '|'

>
>>However, I just discovered, much to my surprise, that the following command will import such a text file:
>>
>> APPEND FROM [file] DELI WITH _ WITH CHARACTER |
>>
>>That works contrary to my expectations. The text file that I am appending does *not* have character fields enclosed by an underscore.
>
>It works because VFP doesn't require that field was inclosed in the specified delimiter. I think, it shoud work w/o delimiter specified

APPEND FROM [file] DELI WITH CHARACTER |