I tried the select option first and got 'no records found'. I then looked up the indexing information and found a related index. I went to that table and removed and rebuilt the relational index, unfortunately the phantom record still remains. If I am required to restore the table, do I restore both the one containing the phantom record and the one containing the related index? Thanks for your assistance.

Tammi,

Don't mean to intrude on your conversation, but I had a problem like this one time. It took forever to find it, but what it turned out to be was an @ID that had a delimiter in it. Sounds strange, but it happens.

The way I finally got rid of it was to write a little program that looks basically like this:

OPEN "", TO IN.FILE

CLEARSELECT

EOF=0

SELECT IN.FILE

LOOP

   READNEXT ID ELSE EOF=1

UNTIL EOF

   READ IN.REC FROM IN.FILE,ID THEN

        CNT=FIELDCOUNT(ID,@VM)

        IF CNT=1 THEN CNT=FIELDCOUNT(ID,@SVM)

        IF CNT GT 1 THEN DELETE IN.FILE,ID

   END

REPEAT

STOP

This should find it if there is one out there. Another problem I had that was causing the same problem was if there was a space in the @ID. For that, I did the same as above, but instead of using fieldcount, I used the INDEX function, as follows:

IX=INDEX(ID,' ',1)

IF IX THEN DELETE IN.FILE,ID

Hope this helps. Naturally both tests can be incorporated into one program.

Depending on the size of the file, this can take a while to run. You'll also have to remove and completely rebuild your indexes after this, if anything is delete, because delimiters in an @ID will really whack out an index.

Oh, yeah, almost forgot. To know if you deleted anything, just set a flag the call MSG if the flag is set. Or, if you want to see what the @ID looked like, just WRITEV the @ID to a table. I use LISTS, another programmer at the office uses TEMP.

Anyway, hope this helps.

Matt

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