Jeremy,

I'm not sure how to get the program to read and discard non numeric characters, I would try something like 'I4,I1,I2,I1,I2,I3,I1,I2,F10.0' with the columns assigned:

year=1 month=3 day=5 hour=6 minute=8 value=9

The I1's should probably be replaced with a string type, but I'm not sure of what that is. However there are two alternatives, one is to process the file to remove all slashes and colons, giving you:I don't know if Rob's idea would work, but here's how I'd do it:

SW 1 8 9
MM 5 11 12 13 14 15
@ 8 rain.dat
@ 9 rain.int
$RAIN
A1 '60 min precip'
A1 ' '
* IFORM ISTA IDECID IYBEG IYEND IYEAR ISUM MIT NPTS IFILE A
NOSTAT
B1 3 0 1 0 0 0 1 12 100 0 0 0
* THISTO METRIC KUNIT FIRMAT CONV F1 - F7
B2 60 0 1 '(i4,4(1x,i2),f6.3)' 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
$ENDPROGRAM

Regards,
Mitch Heineman, P.E. DEE
HeinemanM@CDM.COM