>>I don't totally remember the quickbasic time, but don't it work if you simply split the string into known parts, and then convert it.
>>if you don't know what way the data is stored, you can set up some test data, with some numeric values, and recover the coding from there.
>
>Thats the problem, I do not know how the data is stored and I have tried to write test data to see if I can match the data files with no progress. I am told the data is stored in IEEE format and while doing some reading from an old basic book, numeric data could not be stored in random data files so it had to be converted first and to reconvert it to the numeric data you have to use a basic function CVI() and other like conversion functions. I was just looking to see if anyone else had to do something like this and already had VFP conversions already written.

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Probably, you can just do it from the other side.
Just write a simple QuickBasic program that reads the old data, and saves it to a comma delimeted file or something other that vfp can read.
Probably thats simpler then converting the IEEE data formats. (Isn't IEEE an Europian standard, or is it a world wide standard?)