Thanks for your code, Christof, that is a nice little routine. BTW, congratulations on your appointment to the "Ask Advisor" staff at FPA. Your insights will be a welcome addition there. Glad to see you on the UT, too.

>Hi Rick,
>
>>I was intrigued by Gerry's routine that Christof posted, and sure enough it works, generating the correct packed decimal strings.
>
>I'm glad it worked. I'd never had to deal with these numbers, so I could only post this code, not verify it or even take in account all those variations that might exist.
>
>>BTW, did you know that VFP5 comes with a hex editor that you can use to see this kind of stuff in a file? Look for HEXEDIT.APP in VFP5\TOOLS\HEXEDIT.
>
>Yep, I use it quite often to analyze the format of files, and so. BTW, since I often have to deal with binary memos and structures returned by API functions, here's a small tool I wrote to display a hex dump of memory variables:
>
> LParameter tcString
>
> Local lnPos, lnChar, lnCol, lnRow
> lnCol = 0
> lnRow = 0
> For lnPos = 1 To Len(tcString)
> If lnCol%16 = 0
> ? Transform(lnRow,"@0")+" : "
> lnRow = lnRow+16
> Endif
> lnCol = lnCol + 1
> lnChar = Asc(SubStr(tcString,lnPos,1))
> ?? Right(Transform(lnChar,"@0"),2)+" "
> Endfor
>Christof