>>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.
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>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:
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>>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:
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>>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).
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>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.
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>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.

BTW a SDF file could have var length records. What a SDF offers is to provide the data in correct column start-end positions.
Cetin