Often, users attempt to load an ASCII file in the Microsoft® SQL Server™ native format. This leads to misinterpretation of the hexadecimal values in the ASCII file and sometimes the “unexpected end of file” error message. The correct method of loading the ASCII file is to represent each field in the data file as a character string (character format bcp) and let SQL Server do the data conversion to internal data types (for example, int, float, or datetime) as rows are inserted into the table.