Hi all.

Boy am I stuffed. Just spent yesterday (and most of the early hours today) banging out a CSV-to-fixed-field prog. Works pretty darn good too -- finally. Handles any separator (well, okay, only tabs and commas for now), and it also handles quote string delimiters without a hitch -- I know because I kept throwing a 50,000 line, 64-field dumpfile at it until it gave up and begged for mercy.

Yes, all this is to use EXTERNAL FILE. My idea was that I would do easy imports by:

a) dumping old database to CSV text;
b) run dump through the CSV2Fixed prog (which, incidentally, creates all the field DDL for you);
c) create the external table in IBConsole;
d) create new target table with refined field properties based on original non-IB table;
e) insert everything from external file table into new target table;
f) and voila! Oh, did I say 'easy imports'? Sure, there's Marathon etc. for datapumping, but I figured something a little more hands-on would accelerate my IB/FB knowledge.

Well all worked according to my fiendish plan... except for one thing. I forgot that all field values inc. nulls are space-padded to max length.

So now I have to figure out how to strip the padding when inserting the fields into the new target table.

I know it's going to be a StProc to deal with it on a field-by-field basis, with right-trimming away the extra padding, but I can't get my head around the actual procedure layout.

If anyone cares to kickstart me by pointing out the obvious way to do it, much appreciated.

Thanks,
Andrew Ferguson