The problem of Coulomb breakup in the scattering of a two-body loosely bound projectile by a heavy target is addressed. A basis of transformed harmonic oscillator (THO) wave functions is used to discretize the projectile continuum and to diagonalize the Hamiltonian of the two-body system. Results for the reaction B8+Ni58 at sub-Coulomb energies are presented. Comparison of different observables with those obtained with the standard continuum discretized coupled-channels (CDCC) method shows good agreement between both approaches. © 2006 The American Physical Society.