Mark,

>i should have put in the complete original query!

That usually helps get to the answer quicker. *g*

>

>select mline(memo1,1) as "description"
>

>by changing this to
>

>select padr(mline(memo1,1),100) as "description"
>

>it works just fine. it didn't work with set memowidth to 50 and set _mline = 50 though!

This is caused by VFP running a prequery to determine how big to make the result column.. for the row it chose, the result of mline(memo1,1) was a single character, so it made that column c(1). Which is not big enough for most of the rows.

Anytime you use a variable width calculation in a SQL SELECT statement you should always use a function like padr() to give the column a finite desired width for the result.