You could put a FOR clause on your append statement and if
there are no relationships that need to be established between the records
you could APPEND mutlitple times (once for each format).

You could set-up your own import routine using VFP's low level file cmds (i.e.
FOPEN, FGET, FREAD, etc.

You could append the whole text file into a single memo field and then
parse it from there.

I normally set-up my own import routine using low level file cmds. This allows
me the greatest flexibility and eliminates the need for interim processing files
or post-append clean-up routines.

-myron kirby-
==========================================
>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