hi sushil -- so you need to determine fixed field column positions in a file that uses a space as the field delimiter, and has text string data fields with leading, embedded and trailing spaces, and has no string quoting mechanism? wow. attached is some code that may address your problem -- at least in part. the approach i have come up with is certainly not perfect. it is susceptible to false-positive detection of fields. if you know that all your files always have a certain number of fields, this may be fairly easy to defend against. the code also depends on my assumption that empty fields are not truncated from the end of a record. for instance, if line 6 of example file 1 were just ``ABC_707 0903'', my method would fail, although this failure also would be defensible if you were expecting a known number of fields to be seen. further comments and discussion are contained in the attached file. please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. hth -- bill walters
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