Thanks for the input. My appologies for the confusing explainations of my work. Basically the utf16 file (FH) is being read in and (FILE) was a seperate file I was outputing. I added ">:encoding(UTF-16)" to the open statement on the output file and I am not getting the warning anymore...I will be building a bigger test set though to test it. Now I need to figure how to make this code work in a W2K/XP environment. I keep getting an Unknown open () mode ":encoding(UTF-16)" when running the code in Win env.