error when exporting to text format

[gemma-the-husky]

Dave,
Thanks for useful thoughts. I do not have any memo fields, otherwise I would already suspect something....I also do not see anything strange in Notepad, besides some missings (which is normal for this type of data).

I am intrigued by this, and I am sure its something obvious.

What command are you using to generate the data?/How are you doing it?

what is the file name - particulatlry the file extension you are using?

How are you entering this file name?

How wide ARE your records in notepad? How many characters, roughly?

what do they look like? are texts enclosed in "" characters,

what separators did you use? You say there are smoe missings - but there should still be place holders - ie separators.

Have you tried making a query, and then doing an export spec?/exporting from that?

 

[lkot]

Dave,
I do not generate the input .csv myself, another department does that.
My records are approximately 2000 symbols long, they include numbers and text strings enclosed in "" and separated by ; . I never tried a query for importing/exporting.

 

[lkot]

Today I spoke to an Access programmer from our another department. As a check, he imported all fields of my .csv as text and tried to export it to a .txt file. He got an error message regarding field number 129, and numbers in the message were 32767 and 32907~255*129! So it seems that you both were right, my file just exceeds the row limit. He wants to write a code that trims the fields of the table containing imported data so that it can be exported properly. So it seems that the problem is resolved. Thank you so much for your help!

 

[gemma-the-husky]

it sounds like the text fields were all being exported as full width

so a POTENTIALLY 255 characters width take up all this space, however little was used. You wouild probably never see this in access, as access would probably trim the data to get rid of suprplus blank spaces. With over a hundred columns, the total width exceeds 32767 (which happens to be the maximum value of a 2byte signed integer)

Access actually has ltrim, rtrim, trim functions to get rid of left padding, right padding, and both padding.

 

[lkot]

Thanks Dave, I'll keep that in mind. But why Access has this restriction? Does it keep the table in an array?

 

[gemma-the-husky]

i dunno - it will use some data structure to provide its internal management, and these things generally use a computer word length - either 2byte 65535 unsigned/32767 signed, or 4 byte (a lot bigger)