Easy way to inspect BCP .dat file?

Question

I'm getting BCP error "Unexpected EOF encountered in BCP data-file" during import, which is probably misleading. I strongly suspect that some field has been added to the table or there's some offending character is in the file.

How would I go about inspecting the contents of .dat file visually?

Are there any good hex viewers where I can quickly try to adjust row length to see the data in tabular manner?

Other suggestions are also appreciated.

Answer 1

I guess it depends on your input format. Is it binary input? if so, it's gonna be hard. I use visual studio to open a file in the binary viewer but it's far from easy. The usual suspects are CRLF's in a text field or text that contains your field delimiter or EOL character.