>My users often copy and past text from other applications into an editbox in my application that has special characters that show up as a graphic box character. Is there an easy way to test and replace with a space for characters that are outside the basic a-z, A-Z, punctuation, etc.?

Try

lcNormalChars = '1234567890ab....'
chrtran(lcText,ctrtran(lcText, lcNormalChars,""),"")

From the top of my head.