>I am searching for the most expedient way to change a character in a specific area of a string.
>
>mstr='1st-title: ANAME-HER : 3520931 place[21-22]'
>in this string the hyphen between 21 and 22 should be a dot.
>if I applied chrtran() I would end up changing all the hyphens which I do not want to do.
>
>right now all I've been able to accomplish is to locate the error in a portion of the string, but putting it back together is starting to get a bit unwieldy.
>Is there a simpler more direct route of directing the chrtran() to the area beyond '['
>
>thanks
>k

Hi Karen:

Another solution here :D

Considering that there are always three "parts" separated by ":" symbol, this will do it in pure VFP:

mstr='1st-title: ANAME-HER : 3520931 place[21-22]'
? GETWORDNUM(mstr, 1, ':') + ':' + GETWORDNUM(mstr, 2, ':') + ':' + CHRTRAN(GETWORDNUM(mstr, 3, ':'), '-', '.')