>Hi,
> Thank you for your reply.
> Hehehee.... actually I need both!!! Because I try to use both in my application since both of them has it own strength!!
>
>Thank you

Hi John,

I start forgetting VB, because I work now with VFP (one language is primary :). I don't remember (and lazy to check :), if VB has analogue of VFP occurs?

Anyway, you have to read file to string first.
In VFP it's very easy:
?occurs(chr(13),filetostr('mytext.txt')) (assuming file is less than 16MB).
BTW, alines() may blow up if you have more than 65000 lines in your file.