loading text file into vertica and finding an issue with spaces between the values in columns

sample text file tab-delimited data:

//+0DsAW99eYSL8H //+0DsAW99eYSL8H H126872739 0 Closer 2013-06-30 14:26:44.113000000 www.hp.com hp search  HP Internal Traffic Internal Internal HP Traffic    California Sebastopol   //+0DsAW99eYSL8H ProductPurchase 2013-06-30 16:32:46 1060.98 1060.98 1060.98 1060.98 0 0 0 0   CA 94951 1060.98 1060.98 1 1060.98 1060.98 1 1060.98 1060.98 1 //0b/V97999vlzkH //0b/V97999vlzkH H126833848 0 Closer 2013-06-25 14:30:51.117000000   search  Direct Direct Missing     Michigan Washington 48094  //0b/V97999vlzkH ProductPurchase 2013-06-25 14:30:51 89.99 89.99 89.99 89.99 0 0 0 0   MI 48042 89.99 89.99 1 89.99 89.99 1 89.99 89.99 1 //1f/sDi99Y1Apku //1f/sDi99Y1Apku H127564102 0 Closer 2013-09-18 09:38:50.077000000 www8.hp.com hp search  HP Internal Traffic Internal Internal HP Traffic    United States United States US     //1f/sDi99Y1Apku ProductPurchase 2013-09-18 10:17:27 44.98 44.98 44.98 44.98 0 0 0 0   MO 65024 44.98 44.98 1 44.98 44.98 1 44.98 44.98 1 

The way it looks in the database:

Please check the attached PNG. file. Can someone check the image and let me know why there are spaces between the characters in the columns of the field?

Thanks

Hi Prasanna,

I unfortunately can't see the attached PNG image...

A couple thoughts here:

- Is this possibly just an issue with output formatting?  You could look at the options in vsql (or in whatever tool you're using) to make sure it's displaying correctly.

- Is the input file in UTF-8 format?  Vertica requires UTF-8 and may get confused by files in other encodings.  For example, if you load a UTF-16 file (and you're using mostly basic English characters), you'll see a null byte between each character, since for ASCII characters, UTF-16 looks exactly like UTF-8 with every other byte null.  (If you want to convert file formats, our "Iconverter" SDK example can do that for you as part of COPY; the "iconv" tool can do so at the command line.)

Adam

Thanks Adam, the file is in utf-16 format and I have converted it to utf-8 using "iconv" tool at the command line. The data looks fine in the db. I am just validating to see if there's a loss of data due to the conversion.