Question

I need to import a large CSV file into an SQL server. I’m using this :

BULK  INSERT CSVTest         FROM 'c:\csvfile.txt'             WITH     (                 FIELDTERMINATOR = ',',                 ROWTERMINATOR = '\n'     ) GO 

problem is all my fields are surrounded by quotes (‘ ‘) so a row actually looks like :

'1','','2','','sometimes with comma , inside', ''  

Can I somehow bulk import them and tell SQL to use the quotes as field delimiters?

Edit: The problem with using ”,” as delimiter, as in the examples suggested is that : What most examples do, is they import the data including the first ‘ in the first column and the last ‘ in the last, then they go ahead and strip that out. Alas my first (and last) column are datetime and will not allow a ‘20080902 to be imported as datetime.

From what I’ve been reading arround I think FORMATFILE is the way to go, but documentation (including MSDN) is terribly unhelpfull.

Answer 1

I know this isn’t a real solution but I use a dummy table for the import with nvarchar set for everything. Then I do an insert which strips out the ‘ characters and does the conversions. It isn’t pretty but it does the job.