>>>>>Hi All
>>>>>
>>>>>I am receiving text (TXT) files from a 3rd party entity. I read the file in using FILETOSTR(), amend it, and then write it out to another TXT file using STRTOFILE(). Someone has now asked me what character set we are using for the output file. How do I find that out or answer this question?
>>>>>
>>>>>TIA
>>>>
>>>>FILETOSTR() / STRTOFILE() work on plain bytes. They do not do any conversion. IOW you can read a binary as well.
>>>>If you do not play around with stuff related to that problem the right answer would be: The output file has the same codepage as the input - if any.
>>>
>>>IOW, what Borislav said is still true, not because of anything that these two functions do, but because of how the app composed the string. If there were any characters in it which were codepage specific, they were done according to those settings, and written into the file as bytes.
>>
>>So are we all saying that if I:
>>
>>1) Read in the file - FILETOSTR()
>>2) Calculate a checksum on it - SYS(2007)
>>3) Add the checksum to the file - concatenate the strings, and
>>4) Write it back out to a new file - STRTOFILE()
>>
>>... then the codepage / character set of the new file is identical to the codepage / character set of the original file?
>
>Since the checksum is just digits, which are the same in all codepages, you couldn't have added any content which would be in a codepage different from the rest of the file. Concatenating the strings, I guess, shouldn't do any conversion... however, the safer, just-in case method would be to, in step 3, do strtofile(lcChecksumString, lcFile, 1). That is sure to just append the bytes at the end of the file, without touching it otherwise.

Thanks Borislav, Lutz, and Dragan. I think I got the answer that will work.