IMPORT TXT Statement

Reads a text file (.TXT) from disk into a notebook table. Each line of text in the file becomes a two-column row in the target table. One column contains a line number (starting at 0) and the other column contains the text of the line.

Syntax

Parameters

• filename: text
  The absolute path to the text file to read.
• table-name: text or identifier
  The name of the notebook table to read the text file into. If the table does not exist, it will be created. If it does exist, by default new rows will be appended, but the TRUNCATE_EXISTING_TABLE option can be used to overwrite the existing table data.
• line-number-column-name: text or identifier
  The name of the table column that will contain the line number (an integer starting at 1). If column names are not specified, the default name "number" is used.
• text-column-name: text or identifier
  The name of the table column that will contain the line text. If column names are not specified, the default name "line" is used.

Options

• SKIP_LINES (non-negative integer, default: 0)
  Indicates how many initial lines should be skipped in the input file.
• TAKE_LINES (-1 or non-negative integer, default: -1)
  Indicates the maximum number of text lines to read from the file, not including the lines skipped due to the SKIP_LINES option. If -1 is specified, then the whole file is read.
• TRUNCATE_EXISTING_TABLE (0 or 1, default: 0)
  If the target table name exists, this option indicates whether the existing data rows should be deleted.
  • 0 = Keep existing rows and append new rows
  • 1 = Delete existing rows
• TEMPORARY_TABLE (0 or 1, default: 0)
  If the target table name does not exist, and therefore a new table will be created, this option indicates whether the new table will be a temporary table.
  • 0 = Use CREATE TABLE
  • 1 = Use CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE
• FILE_ENCODING (integer 0-65535, default: 0)
  Indicates the text encoding to use when reading the text file. Specify 0 to detect the encoding automatically. Any nonzero integer is treated as a Windows code page number. See Character Encodings in CSV and Text Files for a list of these code page numbers.

Example

IMPORT TXT 'C:\file.txt' INTO table1;

-- Read the first line only.
IMPORT TXT 'C:\file.txt' INTO table2
OPTIONS (TAKE_LINES: 1);

-- Read the fourth and fifth lines.
IMPORT TXT 'C:\utf8.txt' INTO table3
OPTIONS (SKIP_LINES: 3, TAKE_LINES: 2);

-- Read a file in Shift-JIS encoding.
IMPORT TXT 'C:\shiftjis.txt' INTO table4
OPTIONS (FILE_ENCODING: 932);