Hi, with a July 7th snapshot I experienced messed-up results from working with hansl string functions, where the textual input comes from a text file with non-ASCII stuff (German Umlaute), and the file used the Windows codepage. I'm only saying that gretl should throw errors when it encounters weird stuff, not saying that gretl should support that non-UTF8 encoding! The messing-up means for example that "print" doesn't work anymore with the string variable, doesn't show anything, although strlen reports a positive value. Or the resulting array from using strsplit is supposed to have 8 elements, but only the first 7 are printed out. (The 8th being the one holding -among other characters- the Umlaut.) And so on. Maybe the check should already be done at the readfile() stage. The obvious workaround and solution is to save the file using UTF8. thanks sven