Thanks Bruce, this should do nicely. I didn't realise it would be so simple!

I'll give it a go when I get to work tomorrow.

Thanks very much.

I did search for parsing; pretty much one of the first text strings I did search, but could not parse the text well enough to see the offending lines of code:
DataA=DataA*10+CounterB

In my stupidity and google related exhaustion I missed that (been trawling the net for hours). I dismissed it as I did many other snippets of code. Sorry!

Again thanks Melanie for all of the insightful snippets on this forum!
Baz