>A small but vital part of a VFP application I have in development is the ability to import data from ASCII, MS Excel and xBase files. This functionality is a common requirement; appears in many proprietary softwares; must have been coded many times.
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>I don't want to re-invent the wheel so I am looking for a component that is generic and provides the necessary functionality.
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>The problem is..... I can't find one. Is there one out there somewhere?

VFP can natively do all these imports.
See IMPORT and APPEND FROM in the help file for more info.