>hi all,
>
>we have a field in an application that the cusotmer has started using for multiple things and they wish to continue using it that way. initially they may enter some text (20 char field) like COVER COONFIRMED but later they want to enter a PO number that they must supply to their customer to get paid. this PO number if abotu 10 chars long and is comprised of just numbers. they want to ensure that i don't allow them to create an invoice without their being only numbers in this field. I was thinking about going through every character in the field to make sure it is numeric, is there an easier way of doing this?

Don't forget that a character field will be padded with blanks. In this case, I believe Nadya's solution (using empty() function after the replacement) will work, Vladimir's solution (using len() after the replacement) won't. You may also want to check that there are no spaces BETWEEN digits; I therefore suggest the following alternative:

llValidData = len(chrtran(alltrim(MyField), "0123456789", "") = 0

The above will still accept spaces at the beginning of the field; if you want to reject those too, use trim() instead of alltrim().