Well, I swear I've used tab delimited just fine before, which is what's puzzled me about this particular file. I may have to take a look at it with a low-level tool to see if there's a character embedded that Word & VFP don't see. In any case, it did work to pull the file into a memo field, do a strtran for two tabs in a row, inserting a "0" in between them, then dumping the file back out. With that, it imports just fine and I just ignore the zeroes in the pertinent fields. So, I'm good to go until I get the next one from the client that has something else strange :-)

Yes, I agree, your file and the one I have should both work fine. go figure.

Thanks!

>Works fine for me in a simple test below. What is different in your case?
>

>#DEFINE ccTAB CHR(9)
>
>CREATE CURSOR Test (pk i, cf1 C(10), cf2 C(10), cf3 C(10), cf4 C(10), cf5 C(10))
>
>TEXT TO lcStr TEXTMERGE NOSHOW
>1<<ccTAB>>11<<ccTAB>>12<<ccTAB>>13<<ccTAB>>14<<ccTAB>>15 
>2<<ccTAB>>21<<ccTAB>>22<<ccTAB>>23<<ccTAB>>24<<ccTAB>>25 
>3<<ccTAB>>31<<ccTAB>><<ccTAB>>33<<ccTAB>><<ccTAB>>35 
>4<<ccTAB>>41<<ccTAB>><<ccTAB>><<ccTAB>><<ccTAB>>45 
>ENDTEXT
>
>lcFile = "Temp.txt"
>STRTOFILE(lcStr, lcFile)
>
>APPEND FROM (lcFile) TYPE DELIMITED WITH TAB
>

>
>>Has anyone run into a problem with VFP "skipping" empty tab-delimited fields when using an append from command? I have a file where just a few records are not importing properly and see that the file has three empty tabs in a row and VFP simply moves to the next populated field and starts populating away from there!
>>
>>There is another instance in the file where there are three similar blank fields (toward the end of a record) and it imports just fine with empty fields. I've looked at the file with the "show whitespace" and also with Word in show formatting codes mode. I see no difference in the file points that work with the ones that dont.
>>
>>I suppose I can scan down the file looking for two simultaneous tabs, inserting a space between them (hopefully that will work), but seems like such an obvious thing that should just work.
>>
>>Has anyone else run into this problem?