>Yes, you are right. These files do have a header, but not in the sense that we think of a xBase header file. I have been able to order the lines into columns that are vertically aligned, and I assign an artificial column name when writing out to a vfp table.
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>However, the Basic language must have a certain ASC code that signifies (flags) the data type. That is where my attempts fall apart. Every column is an ASC string. When the string is cryptic ASC characters, I don't know what was intended or even the value. I am looking for something that correctly recognizes the ASC flag that Basic uses to signal Integer and whatever else data typing it allows.
Nope, in those days the data file was just a bunch of bytes, and didn't contain any information about its structure. So if you got past the initial hurdles and determined the size of the header (my guess is just two ints, one for record size and one for count) and size of the record, then each record is just a string... which needs to be chopped into fields and converted chunk by chunk.
You may try to convert each of the binaries using one of the numerous xxx2int() routines that appear frequently here, and see which ones make sense. I've done once some sort of a converter generator, which converted RM Cobol files into DBFs, where it would guess column by column what size and type would the column be, did the conversion on the fly into a temp cursor, and showed results onscreen. I guess something of the kind can be built today as well.