>The '?' comes from BOM which isn't a part of data. I'm not sure why STRCONV() doesn't ignore it in the first place. Anyway, ASCII file shouldn't have '?' at the beginning of the file if you use my code. Maybe they asked for ASCII because they don't know how to deal with Unicode file?

When I run that code, I got the ?. I simply did:

MESSAGEBOX(StrConv(StrConv(FILETOSTR('Incoming\ER20040202230920.txt'),3),6))