Hello list. Another newbie question. I am creating a file in UTF-16, Big-endian. I am putting a 2 byte BOM sequence of x'FEFF' as the 1st two bytes, followed by a prolog statement identifying this as UTF-16 code. I then ftp this file to my desktop in binary to maintain the encoding. Below is a cut-n-paste of the 1st few bytes as it looks on the mainframe box. --------------------------- Ú.<?xml encoding="UTF-16" ?> FF46A9948989889877EEC6FF7466 EFCF743055364957EF436016F0FE The way the display is within ISPF, each byte has one character on two lines, so the 1st byte, FE should be read as col 1 of both lines, and so forth. When I try to create a new database I get the following from Basex. Command: CREATE DB d100217 :zxpf.ftp.download/apf1.v2r3.xmldata Error: "d100217.xml" (Line 1): Content is not allowed in prolog. Help greatly appreciated. Regards, Dave Day