Well Bretheren I've got a small question to ask. I've written a Perl script which serially reads a file and extracts all the error records and outputs them to another file. No problem there! Except...... The input file was created elsewhere using micro-cobol (at a guess) and unfortunately there is some sloppy programming therein! The problem with this file is that when the last record is written to a page it is concatenated with the header details for the next page. In between these records is a hard coded page throw (^L). If the last record on a page is an error record, Houston we have a problem! We end up with the error record and a header record in the output error file. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can circumvent this? I have recommended that the suppliers change their shoddy code but it's unlikely that they will co-operate. Help! Cheers in anticipation, Ronnie Cruickshank (No vice!)

In reply to Unprintable Characters by Ronnie

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