>>

>>mymonth = 'APR' (or any)
>>WAIT WINDOW CHRtran(mymonth,'JAN,FEB,MAR,APR,MAY,JUN,JUL,AUG,SEP,OCT,NOV,DEC','01,02,03,04,05,06,07,08,09,10,11,12')
>>

>>
>>the above code obviously does not work. What does? thanks, Randy
>
>If you need to do this a lot, I suggest creating a cursor or table to hold the data and using a look-up.
>

If you need to consider other natural languages as well, your suggestion is probably the least maintainance-intensive and one of the fastest. But cursors/tables do have a footprint, and using such resources where in other computer languages a hashtable would be used I sometimes mis-use a class and properties with getpem(). And - for larger apps - no problems accessing memory vs. data sessions needing a service class layer accessing service tables in common/special DS.

YMMV

thomas