>Not a lot - do you mean that there is nothing to indicate the end of one record and the start of the next - e.g. no line feeds and/or chr(13)'s?
>Or something completely different?

They are seperated by carriage returns

I was worried about the garbage because we have gotten garbage from them (on accident of course). Turns out it wasn't translated from ebcdic to ascii.

I'll try your suggestions. Thanks for replying so quickly!

>Data in a text file that has no delimiter or is not fixed length is not data, it is garbage.
>Hope this helps.
>Houston.
>PS. You rarely need to resort to low level file I/O, using FOPEN(), to import a text file into a table. Low level File I/O is also probably the slowest way to process the file. On a PC with a lot of RAM, you may also find that your (millions) of records can be imported straight into a text variable using FILETOSTR() and then popped into an array using ALINES().