ahhh - that worked. thanks mike
same problem with sergey's solution - i have lost 'all' carriage returns now and text appears as one line.
back to the drawing board.

thanks all

k



>>thanks for the clarification thomas. that is in fact what i had tried however
>>vfp underlines the sentence (ie syntax wrong)
>
>for lnRun = 1 to alines(laLines, FileToStr("c:\mydir\m.txt")
>
>alines returns number of lines. The syntax of the for next is FOR x = 1 to y ... NEXT x
>
>>

>>for lnRun to alines(laLines, FileToStr("c:\mydir\m.txt"))
>>

>>is there an alternative?
>>
>>thanks
>>k
>>
>>>

lcErg = ""
>>>for lnRun to alines(laLines, FileToStr("c:\mydir\m.txt"))
>>>    If !Empty(laLines[m.lnRun])
>>>       lcErg = m.lcErg + laLines[m.lnRun]
>>>    endif
>>>next
>>>= StrToFile(m.lcErg, "c:\mydir\m_Clean.txt")

>>>
>>>Overwriting with the same name might get you into other troubles,
>>>so I prefer to keep original file unchanged.
>>>
>>>HTH
>>>
>>>thomas