>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.?

Use Naomi's to remove the illegal characters. To replace them with a space try

lcLegalChars="abcd123,."  etc
myField = CHRTRAN(myField,CHRTRAN(myField,lcLegalChars,""),SPACE(LEN(myField)))