On Fri, 27 Feb 2009, Cameron Kaplan wrote: My personal feeling is that pre-processing a file of the sort you're talking about is pretty easy using free, non-interactive text-editing tools, such as sed, awk, and cut. Up till now gretl has not offered any functionality of this sort -- it's assumed that any plain text data file will have its columns delimited in some coherent fashion. But it's not difficult to provide at least some such functionality, and in current gretl CVS and the MS Windows shapshot, http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/pub/gretl/gretl_install.exe , we do so. There's now a (command-line only) option: open <filename> --cols=<colspec> <filename> should be the name of a plain text file, and <colspec> should be a column-reading specification, taking the form of a set of comma-separated integers. For example: open mydata.txt --cols=1,6,20,3 The details are subject to change, but at present the "cols" numbers are interpreted as a set of pairs. The first element of each pair denotes a starting column, measured in bytes from the beginning of the line with 1 indicating the first byte; and the second element indicates how many bytes should be read for the given field. The example above is therefore parsed as follows: For variable 1, read 6 bytes starting in column 1; and for variable 2, read 3 bytes starting at column 20. This option assumes a well-formatted file. Lines that are blank, or that begin with '#', are ignored, but otherwise the column-reading template is applied, and if anything other than a valid numerical value is found an error is flagged. The column specs must be given left-to-right, and must be non-empty: it's an error if the starting column for variable j is non-positive, or (for j > 1) is not greater than that for variable j-1; and it's an error if the column width is non-positive. If the data are read successfully, the variables will be named "v1", "v2", etc. It's up to the user to provide meaningful names and/or descriptions using the commands "rename" and/or "setinfo". Allin Cottrell