Hi, Does anybody know a way in NT of verifying that a file's contents are ASCII or not? Before you suggest "type", this doesn't work because even if it is not ASCII, the value of ERRORLEVEL is still 0, so that does not help me. We have users who should send us ".csv" ASCII files but it seems they occasionally send files with a ".csv" extension which are actually ".xls". Also, if you have to know of a way of checking in a script the size of the file (we want to check that the file is not 0 (zero) bytes), that would be apperciated. Thanks in advance for your help.

Unfortunately the DOS FAT file system and subsequent filesystems such as FAT32 & NTFS do not have any way of detecting the content type of a file unlike UNIX & LINUX file systems which are capable of this. If you know someone who can write programs in 'C' it would be possible to write a program that looks at the start of a file and look for certain data patterns which would sehow that the file was an Excel .xls file and return a different ERRORLEVEL as to whether the file is a .xls or not and at the same time the program could be set to determine the file's length. For any experienced 'C' programmer this should not be too complex a task.

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