You're still not giving much information, as a wild guess I'd say you're using your most recent code to spin through any duplicates that were found with the SELECT, and for some reason generating a period-delimited string with the contents of one column of the SELECT.

If that's not right you'll need to post some table structures etc. for me to help any further.

>thanks Al
>I'm not getting any of the selected records in the browse - but the good news is no errors once i use set enginebehavior 70.
>
>Here's the old school of exactly what i want to do and it gives me the info i require. I was looking for more sophisticated way to catpure the search.
>
>

>extra=" "
>do while not eof()
>if ex1s>0
>extra=rtrim(extra)+vname+"."
>endif
>skip 
>loop
>enddo
>
>? extra
>

>
>
>>>Hilmar sent me this solution for tracking duplicates in a database a little while ago - it works very well.
>>>Further to this solution, how would i display the names plus an added field called field2 and attribute this information to a variable called myinfo.
>>>
>>>Thanks for your help.
>>>k
>>
>>Guessing about exactly what you want to do:
>>

>>select name, count(*) as count, field2 AS MyInfo ;
>> from mydata;
>>group by name;
>>having count > 1;
>>INTO CURSOR TEMPDUPLICATE
>>if _tally > 0
>>MessageBox("Alert: There are duplicates.")
>>browse normal
>>endif
>>>

>>I believe VFP9 (maybe 8 as well) won't let you GROUP BY unless you include all non-aggregate columns. In that case you may need to temporarily SET ENGINEBEHAVIOR 70 to make the command work.