Thank you all so much for your prompt replies. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21895756/why-are-floating-point-numbers-inaccurate was an extremely interesting read and although I am not proficient in interpreting other bases this has been a total revelation to me. I began thinking that there must be a way to read numbers from a file and I found out about arrays and put together the following code which seems to work just fine for me. Thank you again, I never would have worked out the problem by myself. Bob int main() { FILE *myFile; myFile = fopen("n-array.txt", "r"); /* n-array.txt contains */ float nArray[81]; /* the numbers increasing by 0.1 */ int i; /* from 2 to 10 which was what my for */ /* loop was doing in my failed coding. */ if (myFile == NULL) { printf("Error Reading File\n"); exit (0); } for (i = 0; i < 81; i = i + 1 ) /* 81 numbers from 0 to 80 */ { fscanf(myFile, "%f", &nArray[i] ); /* read file into array */ } for (i = 0; i < 81; i = i + 1 ) { printf("%f\n", nArray[i] ); } fclose(myFile); return 0; }