Unparsable Record??

[Timtropolis]

Greetings all,

I recently a flat file into a table in Access 2002 and received an error generated table that had about 20 records in it with the following :

Error Field Row
Unparsable Record blank 174031
Unparsable Record blank 174062
Unparsable Record blank 174088

I went and checked the records in question and there appeared to be no
problems. I then checked in help and some other sites (Mircrosoft support as well)to find out info about this record but was not able to come up with anything. Does anyone know what this means and is it something to be worried about?

TIA,
Timtropolis

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Were you doing this import on-the-fly or was there a pre-defined import specification you were using?

Unparsable record - usually means there is something in the record that was unexpected and not compatible with the data type of the field being imported. Any chance of there being non-printing control characters in the field in your flat file? You didn't identify its source so we can't tell by looking at your description, but if it was programmatically generated, the program that built the file might have included buggy data when a value was missing. The "blank" part tells me that the import operation was expecting something and didn't see what it expected. Of course, for AC02, the error messages could have been updated in regard to what error causes what message, but I have to think this is a hidden-character problem, lacking any other information on your flat-file.

BTW, even if you had included the file, I could not have downloaded it for you. Site download policy where I work would have stopped me. So you will have to search the file for non-printing characters yourself.

Just as a crazy thought, use Notepad or Wordpad to extract a couple of the records it doesn't like, then change the font of this extraction from an ASCII-type font to something like WindDings or WebDings, where even the control characters have something that prints for each character. You could detect a funky character that way, perhaps. And also use the character mapper accessory to identify the character value.

 

[Timtropolis]

Thanks Doc, I appreciate all the info you provided and will look into those items. I figured it might be an illegal character but being that I had not seen this error message before and there was no associated error number, I thought I'd do a post. TY again for your help

 

[russi]

Hi.

Did you ever solve this problem?

What was it?

Thanks in advance.

Russ

 

[Timtropolis]

Hi Russ,

It turned out being that there were embedded carriage controls in my import file

HTH,
Tim

 

[russi]

Hi.

Thanks for the response! I appreciate it very much.

Russ