INF: Extracting Month and Year from ASCII File with BCP

ID Number: Q67658

1.10 1.11 4.20

OS/2

Summary:

The following information describes how to use BCP (bulk copy program)

to extract just the month and the year from an ASCII file with a

column that has a date of "mm/dd/yy" in it.

More Information:

Using a format file, BCP can be instructed to skip information or

entire fields. For example, suppose a table is defined as the

following:

create table bcpin

( f1 char(4),

f2 char(2),

f3 char(2),

f4 char(5))

And you want to load in an ASCII file with the following information

in it:

test01/03/90hello

test01/03/90hello

test01/03/90hello

test01/03/90hello

test01/03/90hello

To do this, you need to edit a format file to include a field of the

length that you want to skip, and then map this to column 0 (zero) on

the server. For a more detailed explanation of this procedure, query

on the following words in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

skip and bcp and identifies and prod(sqlndk)

The following is a sample format file:

4.0

5

1 SYBCHAR 0 4 "" 1 f1

2 SYBCHAR 0 2 "" 2 f2

3 SYBCHAR 0 4 "" 0 Dummy

4 SYBCHAR 0 2 "" 3 f3

5 SYBCHAR 0 5 "\r\n" 4 f4

Additional reference words: 1.10 1.11 4.20