How not to consider a missing field for external tables

Question

My Oracle vers. is 10gR2
I've created an external table using this syntax:
create table ext_table
(a number(5),
b number(5),
c varchar2(1000))
organization external
(type ORACLE_LOADER
default directory FLAISTD
access parameters (records delimited by newline
fields terminated by "#"
(a char(5),
b char(5),
c char(1000)))
location ('file.csv')
My problem is this. I've got a file.XLS that I save as file.CSV Sometimes any row of the file.XLS misses of the last column and so in my file.CSV I can have something like this:
123#123#xxx
456#456
and when I try to perform a select * from ext_table I get an error because it expects a missing field.
How can I do? Can I "say" in the create table above something for warning that the last field might miss?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Solomon Yakobson wrote:
Use TRAILING NULLCOLS:Oops, it is external table not SQL*Loader. So it should be MISSING FIELD VALUES ARE NULL:
create table ext_table
(a number(5),
b number(5),
c varchar2(1000))
organization external
(type ORACLE_LOADER
default directory TEMP
access parameters (records delimited by newline
fields terminated by "#" missing field values are null
(a char(5),
b char(5),
c char(1000)))
location ('file.csv')
Table created.
SQL> select  *
  2    from  ext_table
  3  /
         A          B C
       123        123 xxx
       456        456
SQL>SY.