I opened a PRL text report file in Notepad and it looks really strange. Is this the file I should submit?

Maybe. The format for PRL text files was designed to make it easy to extract the data into a database. The format was not designed to make it easy for humans to read.

Each of the “fields” in a record ends with a “pipe” (|) character. There are several fields at the start of each line that repeats information that would be in the header area of a printed form. Each record is one a separate line. So, for example, one line from a Form 26 file might look something like:

0|C1234567|12345|12455-79|Contrac Blox|12|OZ|7/11/2011||60|123 Sesame St|New York|10210|

Different forms will have different numbers of fields. You can see a more detailed description in PRL ASCII Text File Specifications.