>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.

Then it's not SDF, according to my reading of the docs.
SDF is supposed to have fixed length fields, and not variant records.

>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).

Nice idea, but APPEND needs a MEMO clause to append memo fields, and doesn't translate memo to character.


I'd either read the file using low level file functions (FREAD, FOPEN, FGETS, FCLOSE) and process it as a string of bytes that I can do anything with.

OR read the lines and then split out the lines into the 6 different structures in 6 different .SDF files, using FPUTS or FWRITE - so that I could import each of the 6 different formats separately.