Geoprocessing considerations for delimited files

This ArcGIS 3.0 documentation has been archived and is no longer updated. Content and links may be outdated. See the latest documentation.

In geoprocessing tools, you can access and write data in delimited text files and work with them as tables.

Any geoprocessing tool that accepts a table as input can read a delimited text file. In addition, any geoprocessing tool that can create a table can write directly to a delimited text file. Geoprocessing tools support the following delimited text file formats:

  • Comma-delimited text files (.txt, .csv, and .asc) in which a comma character (,) separates each value.
  • Tab-delimited text files (.tsv and .tab) in which a tab character separates each value.
  • Pipe-delimited text files (.psv) in which a pipe character (|) separates each value.

The first row of a text file contains the column headings, and the subsequent rows contain coordinates and attributes. The following is an example of a comma-delimited text file:

x,y,ID,color
8.6,5.6,001,blue
99.3,77.0,002,blue and red
8.01,44.3,003,orange

Related topics