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.

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:

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 (UTF-16 LE) or UTF-8 (UTF-8 with BOM) text-encoding options before uploading it. If you save the file as UTF‑8, you must include the byte order mark (BOM) to ensure that the file is read using ANSI encoding.

If the file contains these non‑English characters, and it has not been saved as Unicode or UTF‑8, the upload process either stops with an error, or continues (with the text imported incorrectly).

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

If you specify only the date, Participants will assume that the time part of the value is 00:00:00.

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.

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.