I am getting strange looking characters following the data in the character fields. I even padded with Blanks in order to try to compensate for this.

SELECT Patients
DO WHILE NOT FEOF(nFileHandle)
  * Grab 112 characters, strip off the first nine
  cString=FREAD(nFileHandle, 112)
  lcFirstName=PADR(ALLTRIM(SUBSTR(cString, 10, 29)), 29, " ")	&& First Name
  lcLastName =PADR(ALLTRIM(SUBSTR(cString, 39, 29)), 29, " ")	&& Last Name
  lcSSN      =PADR(ALLTRIM(SUBSTR(cString, 68, 11)), 11, " ")   && SSN
  lcDOB      =SUBSTR(cString, 97, 8)	&& Date of Birth
  lcDOBMonth =SUBSTR(lcDOB,5,2)
  lcDOBDate  =SUBSTR(lcDOB,7,2)
  lcDOBYear  =LEFT(lcDOB,4)
  lcDOBDate  =lcDOBMonth + "/" + lcDOBDate + "/" + lcDOBYear
  ldDOB      =CTOD(lcDOBDate)
  lcGender   =PADR(ALLTRIM(SUBSTR(cString, 106, 1)), 1, " ")	&& Gender
  APPEND BLANK
  REPLACE ;
	firstname WITH lcFirstName, ;
	lastname  WITH lcLastName, ;
	ssn       WITH lcSSN, ;
	dob       WITH ldDOB, ;
	Gender    WITH lcGender
ENDDO

Has anyone run into this? Do I need to do some kind of low-level cleaning up first?