Verrryyyy nice, David... One of the better articles I've seen on this type of stuff.  And, if someone takes the time to read it, there are all sorts of goodies...

Right on, Serqiy...

I agree but...

I've found that when the "boss", who doesn't really know how to use a spreadsheet, says he wants to open the result set using Excel from a CSV...

...and, if you do write the TEXT out to a text file for execution, use OSQL instead of ISQL because ISQL is deprecated compared to OSQL.

Just an opinion but both...

I had a feeling you were one of the smart ones.    Thanks for the feedback.

Actually, I believe the smart quotes are CHAR(147) and CHAR(148)... run the following in Query Analyzer and see if you agree...

PRINT CHAR(147)

PRINT CHAR(148)

PRINT CHAR(143)

PRINT CHAR(146)

PRINT ASCII('“')...

Howdy Jeff,

You may want to consider using a temp table instead of a table variable here... table variables don't use statistics so they're inherently slower... both temp tables and table variables...

Daaaannnngggg.... Guess I'll stick with plain ol' English, SQL, and some pig-latin....

Vladan,

Thank you very much for taking the time to explain all this because it's very interesting. I do have to ask... are you a linguist or just really well...

That's ok... I guess I'm pretty happy that American English is my native language   except for the fact that words like "Dude" have about 32...

Cedar72,

Good find... I'm amazed at how comparitively fast this one is compared to the other methods I've seen (recursion is cool)... returns 10000 records in a little over 3 seconds...

Even QUOTENAME comes up with the same problem...

When you want to make a single quote part of the text to be inserted, you have to use two of them side...

Scott...

What editor are you using?  Thanks...

Neel,

What is the primary key for the table and... do you have something like a "DateEntered" column or an autonumbering column in the mix?  If so, do you want to...

"Instead of" triggers require you to do the actual insert/update.  That's not a problem but does require some extra effort.

The "after" trigger you tried to make will work with a...