FreeTDS Development Group

[Konrad J Hambrick <konrad AT jax01.payplus.com>]

Thanks for the great feedback, James !

And thanks again for all the great work
on freetds !

-- kjh


James K. Lowden wrote:
> Konrad J Hambrick wrote:
>
> > What does freebcp do when say, a char (or varchar) field
> > contains an embedded freebcp (field or record) delimiter char ?
>
>
> As far as freebcp is concerned, there's no such thing as a delimiter
> embedded in the data.  You have data, and between the data you have
> delimiters.  When it sees a delimiter, it marks the end of that field and
> the beginning of the next.  
>
> Granted, that causes sometimes confusing errors, because partway through
> processing your 6-column file it will find "7" columns, often eventually
> ending with an error about not being able to convert to type X.  
>
> OTOH, in years of dealing with this stuff, I've never truly been stuck for
> a delimiter.  Normally, I use '\', because it has no place in English
> prose.  If I do find that character in the data, I can safely change it to
> '/'.  Similarly, most of the data I work with doesn't have tabs and
> newlines, so they're fine delimiters, too.  freebcp supports an ASCII NUL
> delimiter these days; I bet you won't find that in your character data.  
>
> If I were really stuck, I could always use multicharacter sequence
> delimiters.  '$%^', for example, would do pretty well.  
>
> For my money, quoting and escaping are too error-prone, too apt to alter
> the data.  Sooner or later you'll wind up with escapes in the database. 
> If you've ever seen email with '>From' in it, you know what I'm talking
> about.  
>
> Regards, 
>
> -jkl