>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?

You can look up these characters using strconv(yourfield, 16) and see if there's anything that's not between 0h20 and 0h7f - those would be the suspects. You can then filter them out using cString=chrtran(cString, "{your strange chars here}", space({number of strange chars}))

Of course, knowing your hex codes would help a lot - you could just view the source file in any hex viewer and see what's up. Nothing bad there, just bytes.