Unexpected EOF encountered in BCP data-file

by Oliver 15. September 2011 17:05

Today, I tried importing a CSV file like the following into one of our MS SQL Server databases: Id;Latitude;Longitude 4610;43.7119;-1.0737 5502;49.4297;-1.806 11360;46.9343;-1.8875 I tried it using the following command line: 1: bcp GeoDataImport in geodata.csv -w -t; -T but that threw the mentioned error: “Unexpected EOF encountered in BCP data-file” cmd> bcp GeoDataImport in geodata.csv -w -t; -TStarting copy... SQLState = S1000, NativeError = 0 Error = [Microsoft][SQL Server Native Client 10.0]Unexpected EOF encountered in BCP data-file 0 rows copied. Network packet size (bytes): 4096 Clock Time (ms.) Total : 1 I’ve had this problem before and somehow managed to remember that it might have something to do with the encoding of the file. So I opened it with Notepad++ where you can easily check and change the file encoding and found it was ANSI encoded: Well, the UCS-2 Little Endian encoding is what SQL Server expects as default encoding, so I changed the encoding, saved the file and imported it again – with success. UCS-2 might be something you rarely hear about – that’s because it’s been superseded by UTF-16 but in most situations they are pretty much identical (check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16/UCS-2 for more info). That’s all for now – happy coding!

About Oliver

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I build web applications using ASP.NET and have a passion for javascript. Enjoy MVC 4 and Orchard CMS, and I do TDD whenever I can. I like clean code. Love to spend time with my wife and our children. My profile on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

About Anton

shades-of-orange.com code blog logo I'm a software developer at teamaton. I code in C# and work with MVC, Orchard, SpecFlow, Coypu and NHibernate. I enjoy beach volleyball, board games and Coke.