>Unfortunately, I have no control over the format of the string returned to me. On the drive home last night I came up with a possible solution; do the ALINES, scan the original string for adjacent field delimiters, redimension the array and AINS in the appropriate places. Not as elegant or speedy as a straight ALINES, but theoretically about 3X as fast as my current routine.
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An alternative would be to use the VBScript.RegExp object to parse the file into a Matches collection, and examine each entry in the Matches collection to see if the .Length property of an entry is 0.