Thanks Jeff, I like this idea because I'll be generating the format file using BCP and dynamic SQL. I read here http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/5e996cc4-466a-4569-912a-8782beba6806/bcp-and-dynamic-sql?forum=transactsql that there's a 4000 character limit for that so the less text in my format file the better!

When I use your suggested version, I still get a single text qualifier left in the last column of the last row of my data. I guess there's no /r/ n at the end of that line because there are no further rows in the file. Do you experience that and if so, do you just use string manipulation afterwards to remove the offending qualifier?