Thanks Christof,

One final question to do with which conversions to use, even though the app is only used in North America (and from what I know, we only need the french and sometimes spanish characters), it seemed to me that I needed to always do both conversions e.g.

STORE STRCONV(lcXMLString,1) TO lcXMLString
STORE STRCONV(lcXMLString,9) TO lcXMLString

That's because the help file says for STRCONV() for nConversionSetting #9

"Converts double-byte characters in cExpression to UTF-8"

So I took it to mean that I had to first convert to DBCS because it would not operate properly on single byte high ascii characters? Is that correct?

Albert