Expected Input Format

A delimited text input file must have the following characteristics:

• The first line in the input file contains column names that are used to create the XML element or JSON property names of each document created from the file.

• The same delimiter is used to separate each value, as well as the column names. The default separator is a comma; use -delimiter to override it; for details, see Specifying the Field Delimiter.

• Every line has the same number of fields (values). Empty fields are represented as two delimiters in a row, such as “a,b,,d”.

For example, the following data meets the input format requirements:

first,last
george,washington
betsy,ross

This data produces documents with XML elements or JSON properties named first and last.