Thanks. For the column headers, yes, it was required and I did not want to do a DOS COPY to concatenate column headers (which I have seen done before) which is even more shelling out to DOS than just calling BCP (or now I need a .cmd file to do several steps) and there are many hundreds of tables to deal with here. Yes, it did take a little longer to accomplish but I do still prefer this approach which I feel is more elegant.

As far as the text-qualifier goes, I did a test and at first it appeared to work. We have lots of embedded tabs here so I created a 2 column table (INT, NTEXT) since that mirrors a lot of what we have (not all has moved over to 2005 yet). In one row I had no tabs, and in other rows I had various amount of tabs. I am not sure how it distinguished between column-delimeters and column data but it did seem to figure it out. However, I did a BCP out and was not able to re-import that file without getting a UNICODE data error. So I made sure to BCP the data out into a UNICODE file (-w option) and it still did not work when trying to reimport into the table the data came from. However, if I imported the data into a table that the Data Import wizard created, even with an NTEXT column, it worked just fine. On the other hand, the data that I exported from my CLR BulkExport proc imported just fine into an existing table. THEN, I added a column to the table (VARCHAR(50)) and on one row added data without tabs and in other rows added various amounts of tabs. Now when using the Import Data wizard it was completely wrong and it could not figure out which were the real delimeters. The problem we have is that most characters, even foreign language characters, are in our data. We have fields that capture HTML and/or JavaScript, etc.; tabs, commas, and quotes are all part of the data to begin with. Hence my need to a) have a text-qualifier, and b) to find one that would not naturally be in our data. Now, if there is something I am not doing correctly in terms of using BCP (and native format is not acceptable) then I would certainly like to know.