Participant file format
Participants reads text files.
The first line of the file must contain the names of the fields in each record in the order in which the data appears in the records; the remaining lines contain the participant records. These names must be regular identifiers (see
Rules for regular identifiers).
The standard field delimiter is a semicolon; if you have used a different field delimiter such as a comma or a colon, you must specify this on the Upload tab (see
Naming the database server, sample database, and sample table) when you upload the file. The field delimiter cannot be a non-printing character such as a tab character.
Make sure that fields (especially the authentication fields) do not contain leading or trailing spaces, because extra spaces cause authentication to fail.
Example participant records file
Id;name;region;password
001;Benjamin Brown;South East;pry6354
002;Veronica Burr;Midlands;qre9510
003;Rebecca Noakes;West;mtev037
Using the delimiter in records
Use double quotation marks in cases where the defined field delimiter in included in the sample records. For example, when a comma is used as the field delimiter, use double quotation marks around the sample records that contain commas:
Id,name,region,password
001,"Brown, Benjamin",South East,pry6354
002,"Burr, Veronica",Midlands,qre9510
003,"Noakes, Rebecca",West,mtev037
Using non‑English characters
If the file contains non-English accented characters (such as those with umlauts), or Chinese, Japanese, or other double-byte characters, you must save the file using the Unicode text-encoding option (UTF-8) before uploading. The upload stop with an error message if a file containing these characters is not a Unicode file.
Using datetime fields
If you intend to upload any datetime fields from your file, the values must be in one of these formats:
yyyy-mm-dd
yyyy-mm-dd:hh:mi
yyyy-mm-dd hh:mi:ss
If you specify only the date, Participants will assume that the time part of the value is 00:00:00.
Loading multiple files into one table
When you load sample records into a new table, Participants creates the table with columns to match the fields in the sample records. If you load another file into the same table, and that file has extra fields in addition to all those in the original file, the load process creates the new columns in the table for those fields, but does nothing to the original records in the table. This means that once you have loaded both files, you can still use the old sample records even though they contain less information than the newer ones.
Where to store text files
Do not store your text file in your user’s folder for the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer project. For security reasons, the upload process will delete the file from that location.
See also