I use flat files as point-in-time snapshots of a third-party database system. Because every column delimiter I've ever tried has failed due to it being somewhere in the data set, I've turned to using a null character (ASCII 0) as a column delimiter and a null followed by a carriage return as a row delimiter. To pull the data back into SQL Server I just use a BULK INSERT statement and a format file the specifies "\0" as a column terminator and "\0\r" on the last column. This works great except for the few instances that I need to perform a transformation on a column. I'm trying to set up an SSIS package to take the flat file as a source, pass it through a transform to modify the columns I need modified, and then on to a SQL Server destination. There appears to be no way to configure a Flat File Connection to use an ASCII null as a delimiter. I can go into the package XML and change the Column Delimiter from _x000D_ to _x0000_, but that won't even parse.
Has anyone figured out how to make a flat file connection accept an ASCII null character as a column delimiter? I really don't want to write a script for every source file as there are quite a lot of them.
Thanks in advance!