Viv,

I will give it a try, if I found a way to code it. ::)

Agnes

>
>One other approach which I think would work (providing no numeric field exceeds 229): Convert to an ASCII string and index on that. ie.
>Translate each numeric field to a character of that value and each alphabetic character to its ASCII value + 165 and add a CHR(0) on the end. So
>1.1 = CHR(1)+CHR(1)+CHR(0)
>1.02.N.R = CHR(1)+CHR(2)+CHR(ASC("N")+165)+CHR(ASC("R")+165)+CHR(0)
>
>I *think* indexing on this gives the right result. Haven't thought through the actual code to translate this but it should be at least as simple as using a stack of PADL() and PADR() stuff......