>>I was asked for help with a toy project - read in a plaintext file and return a random line from the file. I could do this easily with a table, but don't know enough about low level file functions to do that job easily. Can I get a kick in the right direction, please?
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>Hi Chris,
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>If the file has less than 65000 record (VFP array limit befor VFP9), you can use FILETOSTR() and ALINES(). Otherwise you'll have to use FOPEN(), FGET() and FCLOSE().

What constitutes a line? Is this from the start of a sentence? Or is it when a CRLF is encountered? You can use FILETOSTR() as suggested by Sergey and then use STREXTRACT() to parse the contents based on a line definition. You could parse into an array or into a table memo field. ALINES() also has capability to parse, but it is limited in array size for VFP8 and prior.