I did use alines, and it works fine 95% of the time. Its the 5% of the
time that is killing me. For some reason about every 20th record it loses
a field or two. I don't know if it is because each record has so many fields
in it (1435). Here the code using Alines().

DIMENSION aAr(1435)
vcStr = FGETS(nHandle, 8192)
vnRecCnt = ALINES(aAr, CHRTRAN(CHRTRAN(vcStr, ["], ""), ",", CHR(13)))

This will work but then it just messes up after so many records?? Plus ALines()
makes every element a string, so u have to use VAL() to store it as a numeric.