>There's always:

TRY
>    CREATE CURSOR curTest (&UserString I)
>    USE IN curTest
>    llUserStringValid = .T.
>CATCH TO loEx
>    llUserStringValid = .F.
>ENDTRY

>
>>I'm guessing someone already as an easy routine or command for this. I'm letting the users create a string which later is used to create a cursor for running a special report. I need to validate that the characters they entered in the string will be valid in a field name. Does anyone have an easy way to do this?

Should be also easy to set a pattern - first letter is always a letter and next can be letter, number or underscore.

Anyway, Sergey already wrote it without regular expressions with one small typo at the end.