Tom Peters writes: >The text file from the government is in the form of 80 column and 365 rows. >One row for each day. The tides for a given day are in raw form in the 80 >columns of data. My program currently reads one line at a time parses the >line of text and outputs the data the way I need it. Hi Tom, I have a similar problem with my 'Rotation Sucker' Program: this app reads an 10 MB textfile and extracts information from each line of text. As the length of the datarecords may vary, it is even a bit more complicated. Anyhow: to speed up things I recommend reading bigger chunks of the textfile and use 'FN MUNGER' to find the last carriage return in your handle. Put this point in a variable, as you will start reading again from this point on from your input-file. Now parse through your texthandle. You may use 'FN MUNGER' again to find the carriage returns and 'BLOCKMOVE' line by line of your handle into stringvars. I guess that you would be able to continue using all your parsing functions you wrote already. Using this technique (and a couple of other tricks) I was able to speed up 'Rotation Sucker' form 1 hour for 10MBs to about 60 seconds for a 10MB file... As to your question: sorry, I am still fighting with a good system of 'linked list' of simple records to establish a quick and usable database, so I will probably not be able to give you the hints you need. What I would highly recommend is that you buy the two books from Frank Turovich (available at STAZs) if you can afford them. Frank builds a database-system in his first book which might be enough for your needs and will get you lots of input on possible solutions for your current and future programming problems. After I had read Franks books I finally understood a couple of chapters in the FB manuals I always skipped because I thought they were to difficult... If you dont want to buy the books, have a look at the 'STAZ-O-DEX' sample-program...it might also help you with records, but it does not explain them. And: Rick Brown wrote a couple of mails last year passing deep insights to pointers and handles and their use with FutureBASIC. chris +----------------------------------------------------+ | Chris Henkel - mailto:chatworks@... | | http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/chatworks | | [last update august 05th, 1998] | +----------------------------------------------------+ +----------------------------------------------------+ | this is Anja and Chris FCserver at home serving... | +----------------------------------------------------+