The character formats are the ones most commonly used to read and write ordinary text (human-readable) data files.

The basic character formats are BYTE, C, CHAR, and TEXT. Each has a variable-length form and a fixed-length form. The variable-length forms are BYTE(0), C0, CHAR(0), and TEXT(0). The fixed-length forms are BYTE(n), Cn, CHAR(n), and TEXT(n). An optional delim may follow to specify a delimiter.

The subtle differences between the various character formats are described in COPY Format Details (see COPY Format Details).