Mark Pickersgill wrote:

> It's actually for the purpose of data importing. I basically have 12
> data files to import and in those text files a blank record
> (ie all spaces) represents a NULL entry.
>
> The problem is that using the EXTERNAL FILE to declare a table doesn't
> allow the option of interpreting blanks as NULLs, nor does setting a
> field to NULL in an external file actually set it to NULL, and hence
> I'd like to create a (yes, temporary) table to copy the data from the external
> file table, perform the necessary processing and then place the data
> into the new tables.

Try using my tool FBExport. I made it for these sitations specifically.

http://fbexport.sourceforge.net

HTH

--
Milan Babuskov
http://fbexport.sourceforge.net