loading a flat file into an array

This is probably a relatively simple programming problem for the experienced informix programmers in this group, but here goes. Let us say for the sake of argument that I have a file which is plain ascii text. Each line of text is 50 characters in length, and there are 5 lines in this file. How could I load this file line by line into an array where each element of the array (defined as 50 characters I guess) would hold a single line of the file. Then, how would I do this if I didn't know the length of each record or how many there were? thanks, sturat b. tener stuart@jane.sas.upenn.edu (310)-657-1966