FreeTDS Development Group

[Bob Kline <bkline AT rksystems.com>]

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, James K. Lowden wrote:

> We emulate Sybase's utility's behavior fairly closely, I believe.

Hmm.  I haven't used Sybase's utility much (if at all), though I've used
Microsoft's equivalent a fair amount.  Looking at the result of using
freebcp to extract data to a file in character format (-c) I can see
some evidence of possible problems that might be related to the
difficulties John is experiencing.  For example:

 1. In addition to the tab separator, values are padded out with nulls.
 2. The tail ends of longer values from earlier rows are carried
    forward as garbage appended to shorter values in subsequent rows.

As I say, I'm not intimately familiar with the way Sybase's version is
supposed to work, but this doesn't look right to me.

-- 
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline AT rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com