Thanks. I hadn't given \r too much thought, as it hasn't ever bit me. We're on Unix, and most of our trading partners are Unix and Linux. (.?\r?\n?) is pretty cool, though. I'll have to remember that.

I do mainly banking files right now (820, 828, etc.). It's my wife who is in health care, though. She works at Foresight helping develop the HIPAA validator, among other things.

I haven't ever had to argue against the grep utility. My group knew not to use it long before I got there. A few of our TPs send data with no line breaks, and our version of Unix has a grep that can't handle > 2048 characters. Saying "grep says it can't handle the file" carries some weight, apparently.