[theforum] Happy New Year, Happy New Site

[David Kaufman]

William Anderson <neuro at well.com> wrote:
>
> David Kaufman wrote:
>> The last time I spoke to him about getting this data, he was
>> *willing* to do so, but unable to think of a way to "export" it from
>> Microsoft SQL Server 6 to a format that would preseve the multiline
>> text and "funny characters" into a format we could import into
>> another db.  >
> perhaps this?
> http://www.windowsitlibrary.com/Content/77/14/1.html?Ad=1&

This "BCP" won't work in it's "character mode" (to produce text file 
exports) because that mode requires field and record delimiters that are 
guaranteed to not appear in your data:

 - [/t field_term] — The field delimiter indicator; tab (\t) is the
   default. The most common delimiter is the double quote (“ ”) or the
   comma (,), but be aware that comma-delimited data will fail if the 
data
   records include commas. We recommend that you choose a character that
   you are sure is not in the data, such as the pipe (|) or tilde (~),
   if the source of the data supports it.
   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 - [/r row_term] — The row terminator, typically a carriage
   return/linefeed (\r \n).


and our article data can and does contain all manner of characters, 
including tabs, carriage returns, linefeeds and (thanks to lots of perl, 
php and javascript code) just about every other "funny character" out 
there.  This is the "funny character" problem Jeff encountered moving 
the data *onto* his server, and is now citing as his difficulty in 
getting the data off of it.

BCP *might* work in native mode, though!  And since it's part of MSSQL6, 
Jeff wouldn't need to install anything "foreign", which is good since he 
seems a bit distrustful.  But we'd need a working installation of MS SQL 
Server 6 on our side to be able to read it...

Does anyone here have Microsoft SQL Server 6?

-dave