Hello Brian, Thursday, December 08, 2005, 10:54:29 PM, you wrote: BM> I need to extract text from a structed binary file. Its a local BM> database for a commercial app of proprietary structure, though the BM> structure has been determined. So I need to move along a number of BM> bytes, take a few chunks of so many more bytes and grab the string and BM> move on to the next record, dumping the contents - ultimately dumping compile with "ghc --make a.hs" import Foreign.C.String import Foreign.C.Types import Foreign.Marshal.Alloc import Foreign.Ptr import Foreign.Storable import System.IO main = do h <- openBinaryFile "database" ReadMode hSeek h AbsoluteSeek 137 buf <- mallocBytes 10 hGetBuf h buf 10 str <- peekCStringLen (buf,10) print str hClose h -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz@HotPOP.com