>>>Wish it looked that clear. It does seem to have a fixed record length and has what appears to be a header record describing the fields with PAT:LNAME (patient lastname) but there are a load of special characters in the file between fields. Thanks for the input though.
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>>If you can still make out columns, I would also suggest creating a structure to read it into and manipulate it from there. There IS a COBOL ODBC driver, called Relativity, and it is put out by Liant. We use it here to interface between MicroFocus COBOL and Foxpro. But it will require creating a structure within it anyway.
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>Does Liant have a web site where I could find out about their driver?

Don't know if Liant does, but MicroFocus does and you should be able to get there from it.