Data with all special characters - no delimiter

[arindami]

Hi All

I am getting a datafile which can have all the special characters as data.
So there is nothing which I can set as the delimiter.

Also I find that the delimeter allowed by DataStage can only be of single byte, so I cannnot use an extended delimiter consisting of some 3/4 characters.


Thanks

[ArndW]

Normally files like this have quoted strings, so if the delimiter does occur inside a string it can still be differentiated. But this shifts the parsing problem to the quote character, which is also just one character (unless you have NLS enabled) - if all 256 characters are part of the data then your only recourse is to used fixed-length records. Remember that you will always need a record separator when working with non-fixed length records, so not all of characters can occur - at least the <lf> or <cr> or 1-byte separator must at least remain reserved.

[ray.wurlod]

Any reason not to use fixed width format?