>I'm trying to figure out a way to parse tables, not the database
>type but the regular text type, out of plain text. The problem
>is basically where a text file might contain a table of stats or
>data and the algorithm would first of all recognize the text file
>as having one or more tables, and then decide how many columns the
>table has. I was wondering if anybody knows how to go about solving
>this problem. If you do, could you please give me some pointers on
>this?
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Regards,
>
>Fred Zhao
>Systems Programmer
>Market News Publishing

I think a recent article in FoxPro Advisor had a program that could do this. I think it read a text file and could determine where the columns were. It also converted the text file to a dbf. WWW.Advisor.Com has an articles index where you can look it up.