Thanks, John. This whole thing (dealing with non-ascii characters in a file) started as a little detail and is growing to consume me. I know a whole lot more about utf-8 and codepages than I knew two days ago, but I still can't search and count the non-unicode characters in the file. I'm trying to get a general solution, but high-ups are satisfied with "Pour it through MS Access and it will come out converted". We have an international product distributed as flat tab-delimited text files, and I don't think that the MS Access pouring approach will work for everybody unless they are only using windows ansi codepage.