Hi Jerry,

Basicly you can use anything to delimit a file but there are a few different common types of delimited files that you would usually encounter: Space, Tab, Comma, and Comma & Quote.

It sounds like the file you are getting is Comma&Quote delimited. Commas separate data values and data values in quotes are character while all others are numeric. i.e. 23,543,"Smith","Joe",3421 HTH

>Does anybdy know where I can get the "Offical" definition of delimited ascii files?
>
>We are working with another one of our divisions and the guys there keep sending us comma delimited files. Normally this is OK, but in this case, some of the fields have double quotes in the data and it messes up the data when we APPEND FROM TYPE DELIMITED.
>
>They are downloading this data from a mainframe into an ascii file for us.
>
>We would like them to send us an SDF file, but they claim that this is a "Standard Delimited File".
>
>Is there any site that has definition of what the different delimited files types are?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Jerry Tovar