CHAR() vs CHAR()

Another of the "I forget the tool so let's put it in the blog" posts.

Obviously there's the datatype. But you can also create high-ascii & low-ascii symbols that might show up as a tiny square, or (at least in SSMS) not show up at all.

A map:
http://web.cs.mun.ca/~michael/c/ascii-table.html
This also explains some of the other code you may have seen for BULK INSERT, such as 0x0a (which is "newline" or "linefeed", the Unix "return"; Windows uses CR/LF). It can also be used to clean up code. Instead of something like

+ ''' +

you could use

+ char(39) + 

The value in CHAR has to be a number. Which is, naturally, both good and bad.

more examples:
select char(20) --random low-ascii
select char(32) --space