[snip] When I open the list in notepad everything is on one line with a square box character. When I open it in wordpad, it's one email address on each line. [/snip] Sounds like that there are not any newline characters in the file. You could do something like this... $theFile = fopen("http://www.mysite.co.uk/mailing_list_database.list", "r"); while(!feof($theFile)){ $theLine = fgets($theFile, 4096); $theCount++; } fclose($theFile); echo $theCount; -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php