Delimited Files Home | FAQs & Troubleshooting

 

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A Delimited file is an ASCII file that uses special characters as field separators (delimiters). The two most commonly used separator characters are the comma (,) and the semicolon (;). You can specify the actual character to be used as the separator when you define the import function. Alphanumeric fields are enclosed with quotation marks (" "). Numeric data fields are not enclosed with quotation marks. Each record of a Delimited file must be marked by an End-of-Record (EOR) in the same manner as the standard ASCII text file.

Each data field in a Delimited file is identified by a column number. The first field in a record is in column 1, the second field is in column 2, etc. This information is assigned to the Column field for each data item using the Import Field Properties feature (on the Import Job Maintenance Data tab). Because the end of each field is marked by the delimiter, you do not need to specify the length of each field when importing from Delimited files.

 Delimited File Type Example

The following Delimited text file contains customer information to be imported into AR_Customer.M4T. Column Numbers above the data represent the order of the data in the source file record. Quotes around the data items are not required, unless a quote (") is contained within the text field. Unprintable characters, such as $0A$ (hex 0A), are not permitted in the data, but can be used as delimiters, instead of the comma (,) used in the example. Quotes are required around any data item containing the delimiter as part of the text.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

"01","ABC","Customer Name","01","Y","05/31/2010",100.00

The Customer Name field is located in the 3rd data field and can be up to 30 characters long. The Last Activity Date field is in the 6th data field of the source record. Comma Separated Variables (CSV) is the most common means of importing data.

The following data items must be selected to import the above file into the Customer master file (AR_Customer).

Item Name	Type	Operation	Col/Pos	Length	Mask/Value
AR_DivisionNo	S	REPL	0001	0002	00
CustomerNo	S	REPL	0002	0007
CustomerName	S	REPL	0003	0030
TermsCode	S	REPL	0004	0002	00
OpenItemCustomer	Y	REPL	0005	0001	Y
DateLastActivity	D	REPL	0006	0010	MM/DD/YYYY
BalanceForward	N	REPL	0007	0010	#,###,###,###.00-

 

For more information, see Import File Types.