i'm writing an encryption program that separates a file into blocks...in which the number of blocks is in the form n ^ 2, so the number of bytes within each block are the length of the file / n ^ 2. I need to dim a variable for reading and writing bytes of a fixed length, which is the number of bytes within each block. i tried doing dim input1 as string * blocksize but that gave me an error saying that i needed a constant...not a variable. if there's any way to work around this, i'd really like to know. thx.