Jim,
Your suggestion works! Thanks a million.
>Dmitry,
>
>No this is probably not something weird, it is probably that the & is a reserved character in VFP that does macro expansion even whne it is inside of quotes. So how do you deal with it? You break up your strings into pieces a=that keep the & from ever being next to another character as in;
>
>
>lcVar = STRTRAN(lcMyOtherVar, "&" + "amp;", "&" + "new;")
>
>
>This way you never run into a problem becasue there is variable named amp somewhere and VFP tries to macro the varaiable when it sees "&".
>
>As an example try running this code;
>
>
>amp = "My best work"
>? "&"
>
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
"My experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don't know anything at all." Oscar Wilde
"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham