I need to export some data using SQL Server 2000’s BCP utility. Sometimes my data contains characters, such as \t and \n, that I need to use as column and row terminators. How do I get BCP to escape characters it’s using as terminators as it outputs the data, so that I can actually import the data in another program?
For example, one of my columns is text data, and includes tabs and newlines. BCP just exports them as-is, and the program I’m trying to import them with gets confused because the data ends in the middle of a line and/or a line contains extra columns for no apparent reason.
This seems like a very, very, very basic function to include in a data exporter, but none of the command-line options seem to mention it. (Why it wouldn’t just be the default is beyond me.) Am I missing something?
You can’t have data containing tabs and newlines with tabs and newline separators. It makes no sense. Escaping wouldn’t help, because a tab is a tab. We’re not talking c# string handling here.
What I’d do is use different terminators such as
|and||/n, or use a format file