Personally, I'm somewhat inclined to think that's a bug. Look at it this way: Why are space characters treated like second-class data? Just because you're a 20 and not a 30... ;) How about taking just that last field out of the format, and using a print (or printf) to print the last field on the line? You could leave the rest of them undisturbed, so it would be a small code change. Melora