>What if the field begins with letter ;o)

In that case (and in case of padding with any other character)... suppose we have a field padded with a dollar sign:

cValue="$$$$$$$22341"
c="$"
*-- starts here
cValue=" "+cValue
do while " "+c
   cValue=strtran(cValue, " "+c, " ")
enddo
cValue=substr(cValue,2)

This trick to add a space in front (or any other character for that matter - chr(255) would be my choice if the first character that's supposed to remain may be a space) was just to make sure we don't erase any "$" inside the string.

Maybe not too elegant - this is what I did back in FP 1.02 :). But it worked.