I have an additional requirement that I did not include in my first message.

That is that I need to end up with an ASCII file with data that is delimited with a tilde (~) for both numeric and character data ie; abc~123~def. The data cannot have leading or trailing blanks.

I hope, trust and pray that there is a way to do this programatically.



>>If I do [SELECT ALLTRIM(STR(number)) TO FILE ascii.txt] I get leading blanks in the output for records where the length of the data is less than the maximum length. I need output data with no leading or trailing blanks. Any ideas?
>>
>>Bob
>
>SELECT ALLTRIM(STR(number)) as dummy from table1 into cursor tmp nofilter
>copy to ascii.txt type ....