>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,

Suppose all tableX.dbf have a C1 c(1) field as the first field, you could simply

use table1
append from incoming.sdf type sdf for c1="A"
use table2
append from incoming.sdf type sdf for c1="B"

...etc. Unless you have to do this often (whereas this should be in a .prg), you can issue this in the command window.