Could there be a problem with the megastring input$$ statement or is it me again?

I am trying to read a text file with izibasic on the palm (OS v5.4) but the file was not created using izibasic. Let me explain further.

What I have is a text data file on my pc that I opened on my pc with pspad. The file is close to 100k long and consists of strings that are 25 to 35 bytes in length, ending with a LF character as a delimiter. All bytes are standard ascii printable text chars (except for the LF of course). I then compile this file using makedoc to create a .pdb file as per aldwebs instructions in the izibasic maual. The textdata.pdb file is then hotsynced to the palm. No problem. This is the same method I use to create my izibasic programs. Again, no problem.

The problem comes when I try to read the file. The only way I can think of to do that is to read large chunks of data using the megastring input$$ statement and then scan using getchar$$ for the delimiters. This works fine until I get to the very end of the megastring where the last data string is always corrupted because there are several random bytes tuck in immediately before, and including, the last char. My program always issues a clear$$ prior to the input$$ so the string should be initially nulled out. These seemingly random chars are not in my data file because I have checked it with a hex-editor. Nothing in the file but the pdb header and my ascii strings.

If I issue “input$$ #1,4096”, the manual say that 4096 bytes should be input unless a chr$(0) is encountered. There are no chr$(0)'s in the data portion of my data file. So that statement should always read 4096 bytes (until the last record, of course,) but len$$ always returns a value <4000. Len$$ is correct because I can read the individual megastring characters to see the random bytes and, indeed, there is a chr$(0) at megastring location len$$+1. Where do the chr$(0) and random bytes come from?

I would include my code in this post but it may be unreadable due to all the print statements I've added trying to debug this problem. I've done a search of the forum and cannot find a similar question posted. Am I missing something? Does megastring have a quirk? Is there another way to read my data file?
Thanks