Thanks Hilmar,
I am familiar with basic delimited text imports but this file format
is kind of tricky. It is '~','*', and '<' delimited and does
all sorts of multiple loops throughout. Each record has a unique identifier
which is a 2 or 3 letter code so I was planning on using
those codes to perform all the functions. not sure if I am going to do
all the coversion from the file itself or import to cursor and perform
functions from their..we'll see.

thanks again...
Ronnie