Too many fields in record#1

[nhunter]

I am trying to read a pipe delimited file and I am receiving the error above.
The header row is 1,000 characters and contains 60 fields.

There is a total of 24,173 rows in the file.

The error message doesn't make much sense. Is there an upper limit on the number of fields in a delimited data file?

FWIW. Excel has no trouble reading and correctly parsing the data.

[NJT]

Thanks! I've been using a similar approach with a pipe delimited file, but then the layout changes sometimes adding or removing a field... thanks to some poor manual intervention each time they output the data to me so the addition of counting the pipes first will save me a lot of time in the future. I don't know why I didn't think of doing that!

[NJT]

This approach works for me but it just seems bizarre that I can import the exact same file into MS Access or SQL and I don't have this issue. The file is an extract coming from a mainframe I believe, and it is in pipe delimited format has about 70 columns. I've been using the workaround for quite a while now kind of thinking eventually Alteryx will get on board with handling pipe delimited files more efficiently and easily. So after ever update I try the file again and it still never works. I also had issues outputting data back to that same group but I believe with v11 and unchecking the BOM that will take care of that problem I'm testing a file now so thanks for adding that feature!

[marlline]

I run into the same issue. But following your method not working!!

@MarqueeCrew

[NJT]

Can you post your flow with some sample data I'd be happy to take a look as I went through this issue a number of times before I got it sorted out with solution proposed above.

[marlline]

Attached please find sample data. I have 4.4 milion records in the file.

[NJT]

Here's a workflow for your sample data, let me know if you still get an error, it may be in the data itself there's someone storing info with a Pipe within a field, but Alteryx should give you the row that it errors out on. If this solves it for you let me know!

Thanks,
Neal

[Poly]

This solution fixed the issue I was having when importing one of my .csv files. 

Thanks so much. 

[anotherusername]

Not sure if this is appropriate to the task, or carries too many of its own risks of double-conversion, but I imported into Excel (pipe delimited, always text-only formatting to prevent Excel from messing with data, hopefully - biggest risk is dropping leading 0s I think - but text-only *should* prevent that), then saved as an excel file and loaded from these instead. Seems to have been OK from what I've seen so far...

[Sharmila]

You saved my day!! Thank you so much.

[iamdata]

I just had this error and i was completely stumped as to what was causing this with my workflow which worked for the prior 2 months files!  This was a stinker,  just open the file in Excel  which was a CSV for me, and then save as CSV, with no changes made by me.  Then it just worked!   I am not going to question what Excel has done, i now have my output which took the person over half a day to complete and i have the satisfaction of seeing.. 

"Finished running in 13.3 seconds"