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Reading Pipe-Delimited Files in SSIS

Greg Low does a bit of parsing:

There was a question on the Q&A forums today, asking how to read data using SSIS, when it’s in this format:

|Col1| |Col2|Col3|Col|
|101| |A|21|DC|

One of the concerns was that there was a leading pipe. This is not a problem. When you have data like that, and you set | as the delimiter, because there are 6 delimiters, then there are 7 columns output. 

Read on for Greg’s answer. This is a big part of why I recommend people to use Parquet (or ORC, if you’re an iconoclast like I am): not needing to deal with whatever silly, arbitrary file formats people come up with.