Missed that part. I think Herman's solution will get you there, but if you need a one liner, you may be able to get there by using regular expressions. Though I must admit, somethimes those can be about as clear as mud for determining what they do, at least to me.


>Hi Fred,
>
>Thanks for the suggestion, but I can't use chrtran() because of the NOTE: that follows my introduction.
>
>
>NOTE: I want to preserve embedded non-alpha chars.
>
>
>Any other ideas?
>
>Malcolm
>
>>>Any suggestions on how I can quickly alltrim all non-alpha chars from a string via either a clever VFP technique, FoxTools FLL function, or Win32 API call?
>>>
>>>My current approach below. But certainly there must be a more efficient way?
>>>
>>>NOTE: I want to preserve embedded non-alpha chars. I just want to remove leading and trailing non-alpha chars.
>>>
>>>

>>>function fulltrim( pcStr )
>>>	for lnChar = 1 to len( pcStr )
>>>		if isalpha( substr( pcStr, lnChar, 1 ) )
>>>			exit
>>>		endif
>>>	endfor
>>>	pcStr = substr( pcStr, lnChar )
>>>
>>>	for lnChar = len( pcStr ) to 1 step -1
>>>		if isalpha( substr( pcStr, lnChar, 1 ) )
>>>			exit
>>>		endif
>>>	endfor
>>>	pcStr = left( pcStr, lnChar )
>>>
>>>	return pcStr
>>>endfunc
>>>

>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>>Malcolm
>>
>>
>>z="ABC123"
>>?CHRTRAN(z,CHRTRAN(z,"ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ",""),"")
>>
>>Just add lower case if you need to include those, too.