Howdy from Nashville!

Forgive me if this is a "newbie" question, but...

I have an SDF file that I must append into a set of tables. Every line in the file can have a different layout and length depending on what kind of record it is. The kind of record is determined by the first character of the line.

Here is the basic situation:

INCOMING.SDF can have different layouts on a line by line basis, so I need to be able to look at the first character of an entire line, then append the entire line into a set of tables, like so:

Line Layout 1 --> Table1.dbf (which just holds Layout 1 records)
Line Layout 2 --> Table2.dbf (etc.)
Line Layout 3 --> Table3.dbf
Line Layout 4 --> Table4.dbf
Line Layout 5 --> Table5.dbf
Line Layout 6 --> Table6.dbf

I thought about appending the entire file, line by line, into 1 MEMO field (since these lines have over 254 character lengths) in a temporary database, then APPENDing from the temp table into my other DBFs based on left(MEMOFIELD,1).

USE MEMOFILE IN 0
APPEND FROM SDFFile.txt TYPE SDF
USE

USE Table1 in 0
APPEND FROM (MEMOFILE's MEMO field) FOR left(MEMOFIELD,1) = "3"
etc., etc.

Alas, FoxPro 3 didn't like the idea of appending an entire line into a memo field, giving me an error message of "No fields found to process." Sigh.

Can anyone give me an idea as to how I should approach this wacked out file?

Thanks so much,

John