>>Over the last 20+ years I had to export, and more frequently import, data in various text formats, and the most frequent situation was that I had to reverse engineer that contract, i.e. to guess the rules used to create the text. The most frequent solution was something beginning with FileToStr()... and a lot of chrtran(), strtran(), aLines(). Append from... works only for simplest cases, which were always rare.
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>Dragan, that's a long text, but was I miss is your admission that VFP's implementation contains a bug.

Doesn't import from a loosely defined format in absolutely all cases? That's missing a feature, not really a bug. Such bugs can be found in all kinds of attempts to convey data in plain text format. I've seen Excel do crazy things with csv files, so what. The format has limitations, implementor beware.