>>>
>>>Yes. I would use alines(). Hang on a sec, I'm looking at some code to post up here.
>>
>>As long as you have less than 65K elements in VFP8.
>
>Well, he would have a limitation. I've been working with EDI files for almost 20 years, and we receive files contains hundreds of orders at a time. I've never seen anything even remotely approaching 65K lines long. (And FWIW, I don't think I use alines()...I read in one line at a time and deal with it).

I think that's the approach my colleague took. I worked for medical collection company, but I haven't dealt with parsing part and manipulating data/putting them in stage tables, it was done by my other colleague who also was doing it for ~20 years and knew all the formats by heart.