Excellent. Sergey, thanks for your generous help.

Of course, as you essentially pointed out, VFP 7.0 eliminates the problem. Sounds like I must upgrade immediately!

>You can but not with one copy command. See mskb#Q277725 and faq #8016.
>
>>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 |