halley,
I am not sure I understand what you are saying. I realize that $/ = ""; doesn't work for my problem. I was just illustrating that it was a lot easier and was hoping to find a similar easy solution.

As far as having to insert fields - that's not a problem. The record delimeter is and always will be the same thing. What is in between doesn't matter. The problem is that I can't see anything between the end of one record and the start of the next that can be used as a delimiter.

L~R