i was wondering if there was a way to use a count inside a filetostr - quesiton answered.
i was missing the 'occurs' which is what Jos actually suggested as well in a different avenue.
thank you tore - this works very well.
I note your adress change - hope you are enjoying the climate in Aruba.

k




>If the table is a dbf and not too big:

>lcData=Filetostr('timep.dbf')
>lnCount=Occurs('|',lcData)

>
>>I have 250 records in a database called timep.
>>Each record has 100 fields called p1,p2,p3 ..... p100
>>
>>Is there a global search i can do for a tally of the numbers of times the symbol "|" appears in the whole database - without having to count through each field of each record - ie without using scan or for-endfor. ie one or two lines of code.
>>
>>thanks for any suggestions
>>k